Page - 176 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

176 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 they had the necessary linguistic skills, as in Cracow in 1853. In contrast, the replacement of German by the respective local language—Hungarian, Polish, or Czech—from the 1860s onward had far-reaching consequences. Universities for Slavs were the most vital elements of cultural and national policy and were seen as a crucial aspect of societal discourse, in a much deeper way than was the case at German-language institutions. This was especially true in Cracow, where every professor was considered godlike.2 The movement of scholars that resulted from the changes in the lan- guage of instruction brought about three substantial changes. First, they had to be replaced, opening positions for young Privatdozenten, scholars who had been active outside of the university, and scholars from abroad. This process was neither as swift as often supposed—new scholars had to meet the same quality requirements as the previous German-speaking ones—nor as straightforward, since different groups representing differ- ing ideals of scientific development were present in academic institutions. This led to a discussion about how to ascertain quality within a university that had now chosen a Slavic language over German, which I will present here using a Czech university as an example. Second, Czech and Galician scholars had been underrepresented in several disciplines (or not present at all) in the Habsburg monarchy, and they had to be imported from abroad or newly trained. This opened new spaces of exchange in which the iden- tity of scholars would be discussed anew, reaching far beyond the bipolar German versus Slav distinction or a monocultural national discourse. Third, the autonomy of universities, or of linguistically defined networks of tertiary education (Czech Prague and Brno; Cracow and L’viv), brought intrapro- vincial schisms to the fore. In the Bohemian case, this meant “intellectual disintegration”3 into Czech and German academic spaces. Conflicts then arose between the young, pro-internationalist generation of scholars and the conservatives seeking to promote local knowledge. In Galicia the gen- erational question remained less obvious, although because L’viv became a Polish institution in 1871, that is, well after Cracow, a more progressive generation of scholars was appointed there. More prominent was, however, the question of Ruthenian scholars, where both sides’ reluctance over coop- eration and acceptance developed into entrenchment and open conflict in the early twentieth century. The linguistic boundary did not simply create barriers but also opened distinct spaces, shifting the orientation of appointments from state to linguis- tic boundaries. Such boundaries had already been altered by appointments