Page - 168 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

168 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 education Wilhelm von Hartel happily announced in 1905 that with the appointment of the physiologist Franz Hofmann from Leipzig, “an Austrian scholar [had been] regained.”59 While nominations from abroad incurred higher costs, this was mostly not considered to be as grave an obstacle for Habsburg returnees as it was for foreigners.60 Not all such appointments were successful. The most severe response was the ministry’s answer to the Viennese medical faculty’s proposal for the successor of Theodor Billroth. While Vincenz Czerny, the Bohemian- born chair of surgery in Heidelberg, was proposed in the first place, he was regarded as too expensive. The second nominee, Jan/Johann Mikulicz- Radecki, was rejected because he had moved from Cracow to Königsberg “without urgent reasons.” Further, he had “left a teaching position at a uni- versity [that is, a domestic university] only because of momentary gain.” 61 That Mikulicz-Radecki, one of Billroth’s most talented students, was not appointed may also have resulted from the local situation in Galicia. The minister of education, Stanisław Poray-Madeyski (1893–95), the author of the report, had been a colleague of Mikulicz-Radecki at the Jagiellonian University and had himself witnessed the unsuccessful attempts to persuade him to stay: in Cracow Mikulicz-Radecki had been a kind of celebrity, beloved by the faculty and students, who, reportedly together with several hundred city dwellers, had organized marches and meetings to convince him to stay in Galicia.62 The preferences of, and pressure from, the faculty typically determined who would be appointed and from where, although in the case of foreign scholars the ministry pushed heavily for a lower number than the universities would have wished. In general, around 14 percent of nominees came from German Empire universities and 80 percent from Habsburg ones, with the highest rates of foreigners (21 percent) in the humanities.63 There were con- siderable disparities, however, in the percentage of German Empire scholars placed first in proposals at the different universities, ranging from 33 percent at the German University in Prague (41 percent in the philosophical faculty) to 20 percent in Innsbruck. In Prague slightly more than half of the propos- als in the humanities ranked a scholar living in the German Empire as the first choice. Further, the response to proposals also depended on whether the scholars nominated were from the German or the Habsburg Empire. Appointment of the first-place scholar was considerably more likely if he was from a Habsburg university (true in 56 percent of proposals) than if he was from a German university (in 27 percent of proposals), with 76 percent