Page - 96 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

96 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 Galician Politics and Ruthenian Cultures: The University of L’viv The tensions surrounding the issue of Ruthenian as a language of university education in the 1860s were still far from the violence that would ensue from the 1890s onward. Moreover, the issue of language was not solved at this time, nor was Ruthenians’ own belief in the ability of their native language to function as a scientific language clear. Even fierce patriots in the early 1860s doubted whether the time was ripe to regard Ukrainian as an indepen- dent scholarly language in the Russian Empire.25 During the parliamentary discussion on the school reforms of 1869, the Ruthenian advocate Stepan Kačala (Степан Качала, also Stefan Kaczała) partly agreed with the Polish criticisms but stated that the lack of literature and the imperfection of the language should not be a reason for excluding Ruthenian from higher edu- cation. On the contrary, only through the equity of languages in education could this deficiency be removed.26 In addition, the petition on the regula- tion of the school question put forward by the Ruthenian politician Julian Lavrivs’kyj (Юліян Лаврівський) did not foresee a swift restructuring of the University of L’viv into a bilingual one, mentioning only a few subjects to be taught in German “for now,” in particular those essential for teacher education and careers in the bureaucracy.27 While Ruthenian politicians crit- icized the Poles, mentioning among other documents the memorandum of the Prague Slavic Congress, where equality of rights had been accepted, the ministry’s decision in October 1869 to preserve the current language situ- ation at the University of L’viv was seen as satisfactory. Although German was retained as the language of general instruction, with lectures in Polish and Ruthenian in the law faculty and the chairs of languages and literatures, this represented a failure of Ruthenian claims. The ministry’s decision also rejected the official petition of the Galician Diet (drafted by a Polish major- ity) of September 1868 to replace German with Polish while continuing to allow Ruthenian for a few subjects.28 The Staatsgrundgesetz (Basic Law) of 1867 included the equalization of language rights “in schools, offices, and public life,”29 fueling nationalists’ hopes that universities would automatically undergo a language change. It took some years and a change of government to fulfill these hopes, however. Within a month of the nomination of Alfred Józef Potocki, a Galician noble- man, as minister of state in the spring of 1870, the government realized that the Poles could boycott the Parliament, as the Czechs had been doing since