Seite - 30 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

30 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 standing in international competition, as notable academies were already highly valued.44 To guarantee state control over the academy, Archduke John of Austria served as its curator, and the academy was subjected to censorship of both its publications and correspondence. However, on 13 March 1848 the government freed the academy from censorship owing to its inefficiency. The first president of the academy was the famous diplomat and pioneer of oriental studies Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Before the creation of the academy, he clashed with politicians over his involvement with a famous 1845 memorandum, Die gegenwärtigen Zustände der Zensur in Österreich (The present conditions of censorship in Austria).45 During his tenure as president (1848–49), his political views became milder, and he argued that the academy should be neither a political nor an educational body but rather ought to deal with science itself. Under his presidency, the withdrawal from political involvement was immediate: for instance, the academy refused to lend its support to political gatherings such as the Frankfurt Parliament.46 Although its pan-imperial character remained contested, the academy aimed to serve as a supraregional meeting place for scholars across the empire. The reality, as described in the introduction to this book, lagged behind these ambitious plans. While regional societies contested the primacy of Vienna, the academy itself turned to fostering Austrian, that is, German/ Habsburg, science. The empire’s two scholarly spaces, the provincial and the imperial, clearly began to grow apart in the early nineteenth century, and the impe- rial academy was, in a way, a last resort to unify them again. Now I turn to the universities to show, first, how these institutions dealt with the problem of spatial disparities before 1848. Then I discuss how the 1848 revolution changed the universities’ outlooks and brought forward new agendas, which led to the Thun-Hohenstein–Exner reforms of 1848–49. The Vormärz University During the Enlightenment, universities were restructured from autonomous corporations into state agencies, in which “scholarly education [gelehrte Ausbildung] turned into a form of ‘state production.’ ” 47 Throughout Europe, including in other states in the German Confederation, Vormärz was an epoch in which universities came under increasing supervision from gov- ernments, which feared, in particular, student unrest.48 Also in Russia, where