Page - 268 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

268 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 disadvantages of careers requiring international mobility; and the issue of internationalism and its relation to politics. Below, I discuss the Habsburg sit- uation in these two areas and its ramifications for contemporary discussions. Academic Mobility and National Geographies The characteristics of central Europe, with a demarcation between centers and peripheries that each created their own differentiations and hierarchies, affected academia in many ways. Most important, the nature of the universi- ties was changed by the inclusion of scholars from non-Habsburg universities and, correspondingly, openness to new ideas from outside the empire. This was the result of the 1848–49 reforms that received the most praise from the liberal and progressive scholars of the second half of the nineteenth century. Hailed as an asset, intellectual exchange became entwined in both the praxis and the rhetoric of the faculties, leading to different results depending on the faculties’ interests. This helps us to discuss the impact of nationalism and in- ternationalism on Habsburg academia in new terms, refocusing from nations to empires but without overlooking the impact of different nationalisms. Nationalism influenced academia in many ways, including by changing the geography of academic mobility. The reorientation from empire to nation brought somewhat paradoxical results, as can be seen when we compare the late nineteenth-century German-language universities with the Polish- language ones, that is, the universities of two of the various linguistic groups transgressing Habsburg borders. While from the beginning of the 1870s Galician universities were openly advised to search for candidates abroad and made use of this privilege, German-language Habsburg universities increasingly appointed local scholars. In 1910 a quarter of the instructors at the medical and philosophical faculties in L’viv and Cracow had been appointed from the Russian and German Empires, whereas at the universi- ties in Vienna, Graz, and Innsbruck, the percentage of scholars appointed from abroad fell from around 20 percent in the 1870s to below 10 percent in 1910. This number also includes scholars from the German Empire. With increasing numbers of habilitations, German-language Habsburg univer- sities had a significant number of qualified homegrown scholars striving for positions. This made the appointment of scholars from German Empire universities comparatively less frequent and less popular than in the 1860s. In contrast, the use of Polish as the medium of instruction at Cracow and