Page - 113 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 3 ♦  113 Clearly discernible here is also the different value the ministers placed on different subjects. While appointments in medicine, the natural sciences, and mathematics mostly conformed with faculty proposals, the humanities displayed a residue of the tradition of political involvement in disciplinary development. Most appointments from outside the faculty proposal took place in the subjects that had been seen since 1848 as crucial in the pro- cess of controlling education: in philosophy, 55 percent of the appointees in 1861–1918 had not been included in the faculty proposal; in history, it was 20 percent, and in classical philology, 15 percent. The new approach to relations between the ministry and the univer- sities meant a turn toward participative politics in appointments, which granted more influence to faculties and scholars. The realization of Exner’s “Entwurf” went even further than initially proposed. Not only were the high- est officials in the ministry, the Sektionschefs, appointed by the universities and professors themselves, but the ministry was also successively supported by deputies from Galician universities and Czech-speaking scholars. This institutionalized a consultative agency in university matters, making the Sektionschefs primarily responsible for conducting the appointment proce- dures in the ministry. This change is even more striking when one considers the changes affecting the German and Russian Empires during the same period. In Prussia, Friedrich Althoff tightly controlled the nominations of university staff through political maneuvering, guided by a network of informants, similar to Thun-Hohenstein’s methods a few decades earlier.103 In Russia, ministers were constantly trying to meddle in university affairs, and this clearly intensified over the nineteenth century, although the precise effects of all this have yet to be examined in detail.104 It seems that the Habsburg Empire was swimming against the current in university matters, clearly allowing universities more autonomy than its neighbors did. That said, the division of labor and the influence of individuals on the final proposals are hard to determine, since ministers also had formal infor- mants within the universities.105 Correspondence could have been directed through one of the Sektionschefs or the minister himself, or they could have held private meetings, speeding up the appointment procedures and clarify- ing the content of the proposals; however, the records of such meetings were not preserved, unless described in letters, articles, or memoirs. The sources used here do not rule out that there was a Habsburg equivalent to Althoff