Page - 210 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

210 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 1890s, according to the historian Józef Buszko.165 With the appointment of some of the most prominent conservative politicians for chairs in humanistic disciplines, the university’s link with politics was obvious. Characteristic of this was the appointment proposal for Stanisław Tarnowski, where the faculty did not stress his scholarly achievements but rather his connections with a “noble” family that for more than a hundred years had worked on the field of “motherland” literature.166 The direction of these developments in Galicia was fiercely attacked by liberal journals. The Cracow daily Kraj (Country), for example, published a series of articles attacking the appointment policy of the university, stat- ing that second-rate scholars from Galicia were being appointed instead of high-class instructors from abroad, and even claiming that some German- speaking scholars should remain at the university as they had proven their scholarly quality.167 Similarly, the Academy of Arts and Sciences was crit- icized as being controlled by Cracow conservatives. Ludwik Gumplowicz, then head editor of Kraj (1869–74), maintained his negative opinion of the Cracow scholarly environment throughout his life; he constantly rejected any cooperation and publication possibilities there and sent his son to L’viv to study history.168 Similar to Kraj, the influential fin de siècle left-liberal monthly Krytyka (Critics) continually attacked the university for valuing family bonds over scholarly merit and saw a conservative clique consisting of the majority of professors as blocking the appointment of celebrated but liberal scholars. This was particularly evident in the creation of the chair of social sciences at the theological faculty in 1910; as the liberal and socialist press claimed, any number of qualified scholars could have been employed for this subject at the philosophical faculty.169 In the public sphere, the university acted as a conservative outpost, with strong ties to the conservative journal Czas, and participated prominently in state festivities and festive funerals, which were important patriotic manifestations of the formation of collective memory.170 By 1910 the city and student bodies were already anticlerical, but the facul- ties were still strongholds of a conservative Catholic outlook.171 In L’viv, in contrast, some appointments, especially that of the Darwinian zoologist Benedykt Dybowski, brought the university into conflict with the Catholic clergy.172 The university, most of whose professoriat had been ap- pointed in the 1870s, when liberal scholars were just beginning their careers, was more open to appointing progressive and socialist intellectuals than the West Galician university. Around the end of the nineteenth century, several