Page - 248 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

248 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 and the dissolution of the short-lived Royal Hungarian Elizabeth University (Magyar Királyi Erzsébet Tudományegyetem) in Bratislava, the universities in Cracow, L’viv, and Prague remained the only fully equipped institutions in Poland and Czechoslovakia. While the universities established across central Europe after 1918 attracted and appointed young scholars who had not previ- ously worked at a university, scholars with academic experience still had the most prestige, becoming central figures at these new institutions. Because patriotism was mobilized to justify an almost mass departure of scholars from the post-Habsburg Slavic universities to the newly opened ones, the universities in Cracow, L’viv, and Prague experienced a severe brain drain. The outcome was a transfer of various types of knowledge—not only aca- demic but also organizational—beyond the former boundaries of the empire, for example, to Warsaw or Vilnius, something that will be developed below. Third, a number of émigrés, especially Russian and Ukrainian intellec- tuals, fled the Soviet Union and Eastern Galicia. For Czechoslovakia—which had also inherited Carpathian Ruthenia, making it a multinational state—this meant the creation, in Prague, of the Ukrainian Free University (Український вільний університет), a Russian Law Faculty (Русский юридический факультет в Праге), the Russian People’s University (Русский народный университет), and the Ukrainian Academy of Technology and Economics in Poděbrady (Українська господарська академія в Подєбрадах).20 New forms of cooperation were also implemented to accommodate institutions that were considered foreign, as well as scholars who identified with a differ- ent state. This changed Czechoslovakia into a melting pot of Slavic scholarly cultures, with scholars coming from several states that had previously been part of two very different empires. Finally, the question of students received much attention, especially in Austria, now a small country with postimperial institutions. While the universities in Graz, Innsbruck, and Vienna feared that the new boundaries would mean a plunge in student numbers, this was not the case. The regions from which they had previously recruited their students were now in foreign states, but the liberalization of education and a new intake of women and stu- dents from Germany bridged this gap in the 1920s.21 The fear of low student numbers was, in fact, one of the reasons provincial universities opposed the proposed transfer of Chernivtsi University to Salzburg and the repatriation of professors from Prague.22 At the same time, especially immediately after the war, returning students and students who had passed the Abitur (the final exam in gymnasia) but had been drafted before matriculating made