Page - 219 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 6 ♦  219 Catholic predominance did not mean exclusivity, though. A few other university scholars, such as the notorious liberal outsider Joseph Unger, saw it as a matter of course that “not only Catholics, but also Protestants and Jews, should be appointed not only for professorships, which cannot be chal- lenged from any side, but also for the offices of dean and rector.”8 This can be seen in the case of the unsuccessful nomination of Hermann Bonitz for the office of rector in Vienna in 1852 and the refusal of ministerial confirmation for Friedrich Stein as dean of the philosophical faculty in Prague in 1863.9 While the conflict over the proposed declaration of Catholic exclusivity was solved by ignoring the demands of the “majority” and keeping the status quo of official pluralism, such a policy de facto kept universities Catholic. This tactic of ministerial silence on ideological issues would be the guiding principle in the coming decades; of course, this silence may have been the ministry’s official stance, but when it came to unofficial and semi-official issues, its attitude was quite different. The situation from the 1860s on, however, sheds light on another issue characterizing the universities during this period: the effects of Thun-Hohenstein’s personal policy of the 1850s, which turned universities into conservative institutions. One could even be inclined to call the Cisleithanian universities backward, if compared to the zeitgeist represented by public opinion, and the attitudes of full professors in particular confirm this view. While public opinion in the 1860s and 1870s can be considered to have been more liberal than the views of the majority of scholars for a time, one should not forget that the strengthening of universities’ Catholicism after 1848 was a long-term project. Since Thun-Hohenstein had appointed mostly young scholars, they dominated university life as full professors for several decades. One could actually claim that whereas the universities gradually opened up to liberalism toward the end of the century, when scholars who had begun their careers during the liberal period began to achieve full pro- fessorships, the majority of the public turned toward racial and cultural nationalism and anti-Semitism. Benedykt Dybowski’s inaugural lecture in L’viv in 1885, in which he openly proclaimed Darwinism as the new model of thinking, met with strong critical reactions from high clergy and conserva- tives alike. However, this failed to influence the university, whose personnel had mostly been recruited in the 1870s.10 Similarly, in Innsbruck in 1908, the canonical jurist Ludwig Wahrmund harshly accused the Catholic Church of mingling with the academy and violating the division between religion and science. While most scholars, apart from those in the theological faculties