Seite - 261 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 7 ♦  261 in Galicia, discussed before World War I, was not carried out under the Polish state, although the Ukrainian minority constituted (depending on the method of counting) three to five million people out of slightly more than thirty million people across the large republic.88 In the early 1920s, conflict erupted. The University of L’viv introduced measures against Ukrainian students, who in turn boycotted the university; this left a substantial number without the possibility of being legally educated in the language they had been promised. In 1921 Ukrainian scholars created the Secret Ukrainian University in L’viv (Таємний український університет), which remained unacknowledged by the Polish state and, after massive arrests of students and professors, was closed in 1925. While they could not be established in Poland, Ukrainian universities were set up in the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, later subsumed into the Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainian Free University was established in Vienna in 1921, then later that year moved to Prague, where Ukrainian agricultural and pedagogical academies were also subsequently founded. Scholars from Galicia and recent graduates from Habsburg universities con- stituted a considerable part of the faculty of the Ukrainian Free University in Prague, and students from what was then Little Poland made up a majority.89 The university’s creation and shape in Vienna and its transfer to Prague, where a larger number of émigrés lived, were thanks to Galician schol- ars and their contacts, especially prewar connections with people such as Jaromír Nečas, at the time Masaryk’s secretary; Masaryk had also strongly supported the idea.90 Of the other Ukrainian scholars previously active at Habsburg universi- ties, one, Mychajlo Hruševs’kyj, taught in the Soviet Ukraine, after a brief period of exile spent mostly in Vienna. Only three such scholars remained in Poland, teaching at the Secret Ukrainian University, whose faculty con- sisted mainly of scholars who had been living in L’viv. These scholars were graduates of Habsburg universities (not only Galician but also frequently Viennese universities) and gymnasia teachers. Between 1923 and 1925, the Secret University numbered 1,014 students and 64 professors, making it a substantial institution. Some of the Habsburg traditions remained in place as part of Ukrainian education in Poland. Teaching at the university followed a slightly adapted Habsburg curriculum, except in the technical faculty (later the Secret Technical University), whose structure was based on the Technical Academy of the Free City of Danzig (Technische Hochschule der Freien