Page - 260 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

260 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 there were even fewer professors in Cracow a decade after the Great War than in the year before it, while the number of students grew by almost 50 percent. Władysław Natanson, a key figure in organizational matters in Cracow after the war, calculated that the number of professors who had died during the war was lower than the number who left the Jagiellonian University afterward.82 After a brief period of patriotic zeal for participating in the building of new institutions, Galician faculties had, by 1919, already addressed the ministry with regard to the issue of irreplaceable scholars, claiming that a more balanced appointment policy was needed. In particular, the ministry was requested to list Polish scholars living abroad and to put more effort and money into appointing them in the first place.83 Given the difficulties all institutions encountered in appointing scholars from abroad, cadres educated in the new independent state could barely fill the vacated positions. At the same time, Little Poland’s universities increasingly became local institutions, especially if one compares them with the prewar situation. At the Jagiellonian University, almost 70 percent of the professors between 1918 and 1939 were from Galicia/Little Poland, and the proportion of local docents exceeded even that number.84 By the 1930s the university was crit- icized for having too many overage staff. Aiming for the best scholars and seldom lucky with appointments, the university often left chairs unoccupied or appointed honorary professors.85 Moreover, the number of scholars ap- pointed from other universities did not compare to the number of instructors that the Jagiellonian University had supplied to other academies, considered to range from 250 to more than 500.86 The university in L’viv, now renamed the Jan Casimir University, likewise remained locally bound: only seven instructors teaching in 1927–28 had been educated outside Galicia/Little Poland. Four more had returned to L’viv after only a brief period teaching at another institution. The proportion changed only slightly in the 1930s.87 Ruthenian Legacies With the failure to achieve Ukrainian statehood and Galicia’s incorporation into the Republic of Poland, Galician Ukrainians retained their position as a subaltern minority deprived of academic institutions. The question of Ukrainian universities proved indeed to be a postimperial legacy that spanned the whole region. The project of creating a Ukrainian university