Page - 221 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 6 ♦  221 Klimt16 but also in the appointing of rather antimodernist historians of art and literature. It was also demonstrated through the belated entrance of historical disciplines related to the immediate past and, most directly, the removal of scholars who courted public controversy. The reasons for such removals differed from university to university; they included reviling the memory of the dead,17 leading spiritual-patriotic organizations,18 being ac- cused of pedophilia,19 and supposedly engaging in sacrilege.20 While most such cases included accusations of acting against Catholic norms, the min- istry also occasionally reacted, albeit seldom and belatedly, when scholars openly propagated anti-Semitism.21 As different as these examples are, they illustrate that the ministry and the majority of scholars were trying at any cost to lessen the controversy surrounding the university. In many cases, this meant withdrawing support from those who had no influential political and public representation, for example, the Italian minority in Tyrol, Ruthenians in Galicia, and Jewish scholars across the empire. The various forms of nationalism played a sub- stantial role in such conflicts, and a number of scholars publicly presented nationalist views without being seriously threatened in the academic com- munity. One sees, however, an asymmetry here, at both the faculty and the ministerial levels: the involvement of scholars in German or Polish national- ist movements remained largely unpunished, but when Ruthenian or Czech scholars were politically active, conflict resulted. The differences between the hegemonic and the marginalized discourses appear not only in the press coverage of conflicts but also in the published opinions of the universities. The accounts of universities as antimodernist, conservative, and church-controlled institutions, with politicians and pro- fessorial cliques prohibiting all innovation, were countered by critiques that they were a cradle of liberal, socialist, and Jewish scholars propagating their ideas among predominantly Catholic students. One can find this difference in views in accounts written in all the leading languages of Cisleithania. In German one can compare the positive portrayal of the university in the lead- ing daily newspapers of the time (apart from the Neue Freie Presse [New free press]) with the negative view voiced in articles in Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel (The torch) or Arthur Schnitzler’s drama Professor Bernhardi (1912). In Polish the dividing line ran between Cracow’s leading journal Czas (Time) and the main progressive journals Kraj (Country), Prawda (Truth), and Krytyka (Critics). In the Czech press, the conservative Národní Listy (People’s papers) contrasted with the liberal Athenaeum and Naše doba (Our