Page - 274 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

274 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 at the effects of similar discussions 150 years earlier might help us to escape the pitfalls and dangers of educational experiments.13 The final point in the discussion of the effects of mobility concerns nationalism. In the Habsburg Empire, scholars with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds than the university majority had dramatically different careers depending on whether they were nominated via political measures or were chosen by the faculties. While in the 1850s foreign scholars were more often rejected than not, by both nationalist scholars in the faculties and the public sphere in certain cities, later they were accepted and could, even after the Great War, make a career for themselves. The examples of German-language scholars appointed to Galicia in the late nineteenth cen- tury, such as Leopold Adametz, or of scholars teaching German philology there, show that acceptance and scholarly productivity went hand in hand. But to be successful, scholars had to adapt, at least partially, to the norms of the majority, including in language (if only a passive knowledge) and contacts with the local populace. The creation of imperial hubs of German-language academics in the 1850s should, however, not be uncritically called a failure. The knowledge they brought with them largely contributed to the thriving of institutions, although it rarely resulted in the creation of local schools and the education of a new generation of local scholars. The relationship between academia and the public sphere further affected developments in both the sciences and the humanities. Engagement in the public sphere was voluntary; some nonlocal scholars did not venture to do so, but most actually did. This affected both their scholarly production and their broader societal knowledge. Adametz, for example, as a professor of domestic animal husbandry and dairy science in Cracow, profited from contact with local farmers while working on new breeds of cattle, which in turn changed Galician farming.14 Galician profes- sors of the humanities served as reviewers or publicists in the popular press, and most served as translators, thus bridging the ever-growing linguistic divide in the monarchy.15 In fact, most scholars whom historians choose to represent nine- teenth-century Cisleithanian universities, whether they identified as Germans or Slavs, not only excelled in scholarly matters but were also pub- licly involved intellectuals. With this historical perspective in mind, one can question the trends in the academic world that reinforce the idea of universities as ivory towers, and scholarship as a practice best done in isola- tion from the rest of society. Institutes for advanced study, transdisciplinary yet secluded places, would be one example of how these trends manifest