Seite - 110 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

110 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 decided shortly before World War I but not carried out).93 Since the cities in question comprised a variety of cultural groups, the ministry had to ensure that no one cultural group opposed the creation of a university for any other cultural group. Slovenes were the main challenge to the establishment of an Italian institution in Trieste, whereas Czech groups contested the location of such an institution in Vienna, otherwise an elegant solution that would avoid clashes with Tyrolean and Istrian nationalists.94 In Innsbruck there was also debate about the languages in which stu- dents should be taught and examined. Since 1867 the civil service in Tyrol had been multilingual, so this issue concerned the law faculty the most. Before 1864 students could take Italian rigorosa (oral exams) at several law faculties across the country, and the University of Innsbruck offered several Italian lectures. Although both the Tyrolean Diet and the university claimed the equality of the Italian language at the university (but without a fifty-fifty division of chairs), the number of Italian lectures gradually diminished, and the political atmosphere around them grew tense. In the 1860s the creation of parallel chairs in Italian at the law faculty resulted in projects proposing the university’s reorganization, with addi- tional rights for the Italian language—but only to such an extent as to “not imperil the unity of the German faculty [and to] exclude the lame incubus of bilingualism [Utraquisierung],”95 as German-speaking professors argued. In contrast, in the 1870s the ministry ignored demands by the medical fac- ulty and the Diet for a continuation of bilingual instruction in midwifery in Innsbruck.96 The final straw was the habilitation of Francesco Menestrina in Austrian civil law in the Italian language in 1901. This realized what had legally been possible for decades, but as a direct consequence, both the German nationalist professors at the university and the influential Tyrolean Burschenschaften (student fraternities) raised the alarm. Not only was cul- tural conflict within the province a problem, but so was the possibility of strengthening pro-Risorgimento Italian activists. The intensity of Tyrolean nationalization could be perceived even at the level of nationally indifferent groups such as the Ladinians, whose language became a cause of disagree- ment in the later nineteenth century: whether it was distinct from Italian or a dialect of that language.97 In the end, serious clashes among students and the interpellations of strong German Catholic parliamentarians led in 1904 to the withdrawal of all privileges for the Italian language and the conversion of its chair into a