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Founding
Founding of Lviv University
public university in Lviv, Ukraine
- 1661
- Europe
Founding
public university in Lviv, Ukraine
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
The Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (named after Ivan Franko, Ukrainian: Львівський національний університет імені Івана Франка, romanized: Lvivskyi natsionalnyi universytet imeni Ivana Franka) is a state-sponsored university in Lviv, Ukraine. Since 1940 the university is named after Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko.
The university dates back to 1661 when John II Casimir, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, granted it its first royal charter. Although the university’s activities were repeatedly interrupted and affected by political upheavals, it has preserved a continuity of tradition with the institution founded in 1661, which makes it, in this respect, the oldest institution of higher education in present-day Ukraine. The present institution can be dated to 1940.
The university was founded on 20 January 1661, when King and Grand Duke John II Casimir granted a charter to the city's Jesuit Collegium, founded in 1608, giving it "the honor of an academy and the title of a university". In 1589, the Jesuits had tried to found a university earlier, but did not succeed. Establishing another seat of learning in the Kingdom of Poland was seen as a threat by the authorities of Kraków's Jagiellonian University, which did not want a rival and stymied the Jesuits' plans for the following years.
According to the Treaty of Hadiach (1658), an Orthodox Ruthenian academy was to be created in Kyiv and another one in an unspecified location. The Jesuits suspected that it would be established in Lwów/Lviv on the foundations of the Orthodox Brotherhood's school, and used this as a pretext for obtaining a royal mandate that elevated their college to the status of an academy (no city could have two academies). King John II Casimir was a supporter of the Jesuits and his stance was crucial. The original royal charter was subsequently confirmed by another decree issued in Częstochowa on 5 February 1661.
In 1758, King Augustus III issued a decree, which described the Collegium as an academy, equal in fact status to the Jagiellonian University, with two faculties, those of Theology and Philosophy.
In 1772, the city of Lwów was annexed by Austria (see: Partitions of Poland). Its German name was Lemberg and hence that of the university. In 1773, the Suppression of the Society of Jesus by Rome (Dominus ac Redemptor) was soon followed by the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which meant that the university was excluded from the Commission of National Education reform. It was renamed Theresianum by the Austrians, i.e. a State Academy. On 21 October 1784, the Austrian Emperor Joseph II signed an act of foundation of a secular university. He began to Germanise the institution by bringing German-speaking professors from various parts of the empire. The university now had four faculties. To theology and philosophy were added those of law and medicine. Latin was the official language of the university, with Polish and German as auxiliary. Literary Slaveno-Rusyn (Ruthenian/Ukrainian) of the period had been used in the Studium Ruthenium (1787–1809), a special institute of the university for educating candidates for the Uniate (Greek-Catholic) priesthood.
In 1805, the university was closed, as Austria, then involved in the Napoleonic Wars, did not have sufficient funds to support it. It was transformed into an academic lyceum, which continued to provide higher education. It retained four faculties and a substantial part of the existing curriculum. The university was reopened in 1817. Officially Vienna described it as an "act of mercy", but the actual reasons were different. The Austrian government was aware of the pro-Polish stance of the Russian Emperor Alexander I and the Austrians wanted to challenge it. However, the quality of the university's education was not considered high. Latin was replaced by German and most professors were regarded as ''mediocre''. The few good ones regarded their stay in Lemberg as a springboard to other centres.
In 1848, when the pan-European revolution reached Lemberg (see: Revolutions of 1848), students of the university created two organizations: "The Academic Legion" and "the Academic Committee" both of which demanded that the university be Polonized. The government in Vienna answered with force, and on 2 November 1848, the centre of the city was shelled by the troops led by General Hammerstein striking the buildings of the university, especially its library. A curfew was called and the university was temporarily closed. Major demand for Ukrainians was the education of teachers and promotion of Ukrainian culture through Ukrainian courses at the university and to this end, a committee for the Defense of Ukrainian Education was created.
The university resumed its activities after the disruption caused by the events of 1848. Following the introduction of Galician autonomy, its administration and instruction were gradually Polonized. On 4 July 1871, Emperor Franz Joseph I issued a decree lifting restrictions on the use of Polish and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) as languages of instruction at the faculties of law and philosophy. Polish became the language of the university's internal administration. In 1879, Polish became the principal language of instruction.
It was reopened in January 1850, with only limited autonomy. After a few years the Austrians relented and on 4 July 1871 Vienna declared Polish and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) as the official languages at the university. Eight years later this was changed. The Austrian authorities declared Polish as the main teaching medium with Ruthenian and German as auxiliary. Examinations in the two latter languages were possible as long as the professors used them. This move created unrest among the Ruthenians (Ukrainians), who were demanding equal rights. In 1908, a Ruthenian student of the philosophy faculty, Miroslaw Siczynski, had assassinated the Polish governor of Galicia, Andrzej Kazimierz Potocki.
Meanwhile, the University of Lemberg thrived, being one of two Polish language universities in Galicia, the other one was the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Its professors were famous across Europe, with such renowned names as Wladyslaw Abraham, Oswald Balzer, Szymon Askenazy, Stanislaw Zakrzewski, Zygmunt Janiszewski, Kazimierz Twardowski, Benedykt Dybowski, Marian Smoluchowski and Ludwik Rydygier.
In the 1870s, Ivan Franko studied at Lemberg University. He entered world history as a well-known Ukrainian scholar, public figure, writer, and translator. In 1894, the newly founded Chair of World History and the History of Eastern Europe was headed by Professor Mykhailo Hrushevskyi (1866–1934), a scholar of Ukrainian History, founder of the Ukrainian Historical School, and author of the ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rusʹ, hundreds of works on History, History of Literature, Historiography, and Source Studies. In 1904, a special summer course in Ukrainian studies was organized in Lviv, primarily for Eastern Ukrainian students.
The number of students grew from 1,732 in 1897 to 3,582 in 1906. Poles made up around 75% of the students, Ukrainians 20%, other nationalities 5%. In mid-December 1910, Ukrainian women students at Lviv University established a Student Union's women's branch, their twenty members meeting regularly to discuss current affairs. In July 1912, they met with their Jewish counterpart branch to discuss the representation of women in the student body of the university.
During the Interbellum period, the region was part of the Second Polish Republic and the university was known as "Jan Kazimierz University" (Polish: Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza), in honor of its founder, King John II Casimir Vasa. The decision to name the school after the king was taken by the government of Poland on 22 November 1919.
In 1920, the university was rehoused by the Polish government in the building formerly used by the Sejm of the Land, which has since been the university's main location. Its first rector during the Second Polish Republic was the famous poet, Jan Kasprowicz.
Lwów was the second most important academic center in inter-war Poland. The Jan Kazimierz University was the third biggest university in the country after the University of Warsaw and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. It was one of the most influential scholarly institutions of the Second Polish Republic, notable for its schools of mathematics (Stefan Banach, Hugo Steinhaus), logics (Kazimierz Twardowski), history and law (Oswald Balzer), anthropology (Jan Czekanowski), and geography (Eugeniusz Romer).
The university's library acquired, among others, the collection of Witold Kazimierz Czartoryski and 1,300 old Polish books from the 16th and 17th century, previously belonging to Józef Koziebrodzki. By September 1939, it expanded to 420,000 volumes, including 1,300 manuscripts, 3,000 diplomas and incunables, and possessed 14,000 numismatic items.
In 1924, the Philosophy Faculty was divided into Humanities and Mathematics and Biology Departments, thus there were now five faculties. In the 1934/35 academic year, the breakdown of the student body was as follows:
Altogether, during the academic year 1934/35, there were 5900 students at the university, consisting by religious observance of:
Ukrainian professors were required to take a formal oath of allegiance to Poland; most of them refused and left the university in the early 1920s. The principle of "Numerus clausus" had been introduced after which Ukrainian applicants were discriminated against – Ukrainian applications were capped at 15% of the intake, whereas Poles enjoyed a 50% quota at the time.
Polish national-democrats also strove to implement a numerus clausus for Jews. During the 1920-30s, Polish national-democratic students chased local Jews and beat Jewish students, so that the university finally allow installment of ghetto benches for Jewish students.
After the German invasion of Poland and the accompanying Soviet invasion in September 1939, the Soviet administration permitted classes to continue. Initially, the school worked in the pre-war Polish system. On 18 October, however, the Polish rector, Professor Roman Longchamps de Bérier, was dismissed and replaced by Mykhailo Marchenko, a Ukrainian historian transferred from the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kyiv, grandfather of Ukrainian journalist and dissident Valeriy Marchenko. His role was to Ukrainize and Sovietize the university. At the beginning of January 1940, the official name of the university was changed to Ivan Franko Lviv State University. Ukrainian was introduced as the language of instruction. Polish professors and administrative assistants were increasingly fired and replaced by cadres specializing in Marxism, Leninism, political economics, as well as Ukrainian and Soviet literature, history, and geography. This was accompanied by the closure of departments seen as related to religion, free-market economics, capitalism, or the West in general. All academics specializing in Polish geography, literature, and history were dismissed. Marchenko was released from his post in Spring 1940 and arrested in June 1941. From 1939 to 1941, the Soviets killed 17 and imprisoned 37 academics from the University of Jan Kazimierz.
After Lviv was occupied by the Nazi Germany in June 1941, the Germans closed the University of Ivan Franko and killed over 20 Polish professors (as well as members of their households and guests, increasing the total number of victims to above forty). The victims included lecturers from the University of Lviv and other local academic institutions. Among the killed was the last rector of the University of Jan Kazimierz, Roman Longchamps de Berier, his three sons, and the former Polish prime minister and a polytechnic professor, Kazimierz Bartel. The underground University of Jan Kazimierz was established in Autumn 1941.
Text from the Wikipedia article “University of Lviv”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.