Page - 47 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 1 ♦  47 Exner’s role in the implementation of these reforms diminished over time, and he died prematurely in 1853. He remained popular among univer- sity professors, however, and his projects have been acknowledged as more liberal than those that were ultimately introduced. Franz Krones formulated a metaphor for the change in the political atmosphere between 1848 and 1849, stating that the final reform related to Exner’s project as “the imposed constitution [of 1849] [did] to the April Constitution.”121 This reform im- plementation was already marked less by Exner than by Thun-Hohenstein, the “conservative savior”122 of Habsburg education, who saved education both for and from the conservatives. As a moderate politician, he fiercely rejected the neoabsolutist turn toward complete subjection of universities to the government but at the same time pursued a statist and Catholic appoint- ment policy, discussed in the next chapter. As I argue, while conducted with conservative ideologies in mind, Thun-Hohenstein’s modifications and ap- pointments in fact paved the way for the developments in the late nineteenth century, including spatial disintegration along linguistic lines.