Page - 192 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

192 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 creating a tension between closeness and openness similar to the situation in Prague. In comparison with German-language Habsburg universities, where turnover in academic positions was the norm, Galician universities primar- ily promoted their own scientific staff: around 75 percent of scholars spent their entire careers at the university where they had habilitated, and half of these became associate or full professors.75 Except during the period when Galician universities were German-language institutions, scholars working outside of universities were seldom appointed to chairs. Before the language reforms, such scholars (including litterateurs and gymnasium teachers) had often been directly appointed as professors, comprising around 20 percent of all professors at the time (i.e., before 1861 in Cracow and 1871 in L’viv). In the nineteenth century, the Polish independence movement, social- ism, and the Russophile movement were more developed abroad than in the monarchy, and the provincial government intended to limit the possibility of importing them into Galicia. At the same time, the threat of nationalism as such had diminished in the eyes of political elites in the 1860s; it was no longer seen as a category that excluded candidates from teaching positions so long as it was not linked to independence movements or political radicalism. Still, political supervision was in place, and the L’viv professor of Ruthenian language and literature Jakiv Holovac’kyj, whom the provincial government suspected of being a member of the Russophile movement, was dismissed from that university, although the faculty fought this decision bitterly.76 The acceptance of nationalist rhetoric is clearly discernible in both applications for habilitations and professorships at universities and cor- respondence with the ministry, where the well-being of the Polish nation within (and later also outside of) the Habsburg conglomerate was increas- ingly accentuated. The case of Oettinger, mentioned above, already signaled a changing attitude toward nationality in the late 1860s. In the same pe- riod, when the Cracow philosophical faculty applied for the reinstatement of Wincenty Pol at the university, Pol wrote that the political conditions that had led to his dismissal had “changed constitutionally in the question of national development and education; this could qualify the decision to regain my previous position at . . . the University of Cracow.”77 The faculty welcomed this proposal, and the provincial government emphasized that Pol belonged to “the most acclaimed men of his nation, [and] his restitution would find the approbation and most appreciative gratefulness of the whole country,”78 referring clearly to the Polish nation and not to Galicia. Even if the application was ultimately unsuccessful, it used a language that had been