Page - 213 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 5 ♦  213 him as a nationalistic radical (quoted in the epigraph).183 Rezek was Tomek’s student but turned to Goll afterward, and he was influential in supporting Goll’s students in Vienna, who faced constant opposition from conservatives in Prague. Such was the case in the appointment of Rezek’s replacement: Goll and Rezek secured the appointment of Josef Pekař, a critical-positivist historian of Hussitism, instead of Josef Píč, an archaeologist favoring the view that the manuscripts were authentic, who was supported by Tomek and the conservatives.184 These divisions did not run only between old and young politically ac- tive professors; from the mid-1890s, they also ran across these boundaries in a fierce conflict between “Masaryk’s sect and Goll’s school.”185 The trigger was Masaryk’s publications in which he described the meaning of Czech history and thus of Czech nationality as a direct outcome of the Hussites, and thus equated Czech nationhood with Protestantism. This socio-philosophical idea met with strong criticism from Goll’s students, who accused Masaryk of methodological inconsequence and presentism in which he promoted a political program under the guise of historiosophy. These constant conflicts led Rezek, now a ministerial official, to voice a clear critique in 1899: “What overcomes me is the fight against intrigues from Bohemia and of Czechs against Czechs.”186 Habsburg Slavic Spaces This chapter has argued that after the language changes the spatial dynamics of Slavic universities changed significantly. Still part of the legal structure of Cisleithanian universities, they developed their own spaces of recruitment, their own hierarchies, and their own conflicts, although, as I show in the next chapters, they were also heavily influenced by overarching pan-Habsburg phenomena. Bohemia and Galicia shared several features, such as the idea of finding national scholars, but differed in a few others. Most notably, Galicia opened to scholars from abroad, while the Czech University in Prague could not, although it appointed Czech scholars who had found no place at Habsburg universities before 1882 and had emigrated. In contrast, Galician universities openly invited Polish graduates from the German and Russian Empires to habilitate and thus assured a faculty with a diversified educational back- ground. Second, from the point of view of the Habsburg Empire, Galicia