Seite - 90 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

90 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 all within just over a decade. It would be wrong to call it a revolution, but it brought a realization of the promises of the 1848 revolution. The Habsburg universities had to wait another few years for the liberalization of education; however, the early 1860s paved the way forward more than Thun-Hohenstein could have envisaged. Two major alterations in Habsburg politics deserve mention here. First, the government’s handling of univer- sity matters between 1861 and 1867, when there was no Ministry of Religion and Education, symbolically strengthened the scholarly community in relation to the politicians. While during Thun-Hohenstein’s tenure the ministry made most decisions without consulting the faculties, from 1863 on university scholars had an important voice, if not necessarily the final say. An intermediate body composed of selected Cisleithanian academics, the Unterrichtsrath (education council), initially became the pivotal body for educational matters in Vienna. After its abolition in 1867, subsequent ministers rarely disagreed with the faculties’ appointment proposals; in this way academic autonomy, prescribed in the postrevolutionary legis- lation, became more of a reality. Second, language changes in Pest (from German to Hungarian), Cracow (to bilingual Polish-German instruction), and, finally, L’viv (to Polish-Ruthenian instruction) changed the intellectual geography of the empire. From this point on, linguistically codified aca- demic subsystems began to develop, and these in turn created their own spaces of mobility. Universities developed their own dynamics, even if framed by the polit- ical, legal, and social contexts. In this chapter I discuss the most important legal changes and show how they influenced the cohesion of the imperial university space. From the point of view of monarchical academic space, the change in the language of instruction mattered most. Therefore, I look at this change, considering the role ascribed to universities and scholarship in general. Skeptical German-speaking politicians bemoaned the lack of control over non-German institutions and claimed that they had become cut off from the Habsburg system.3 Slavic scholars countered that the language change did not necessarily mean the dissolution of the empire and that contacts should be kept. As I argue below, all these voices have to be read in context. For instance, the criticisms from the German-language press and politicians bore traces of the imperialistic equation of German and culture. And, as I have previously argued, in discussions in L’viv, the Poles used a similar argument to withhold Ruthenian as the language of instruction. But even if