The University of Warsaw in the system of higher (university) education of the Russian Empire in the first third of the 19th century

The article is devoted to the history of the establishment of the University of Warsaw in 1816 and its development until 1831 when the university was closed after the suppression of the November Uprising of 1830–31. The specificity of the University of Warsaw was determined by the fact that during that time the Congress Kingdom of Poland that had been annexed to Russia in 1815 was an autonomous territorial entity and had a separate educational system that was not subordinate to the Ministry of National Education in St Petersburg. Neither Russian nor Polish historiography has made a comprehensive comparison of the University of Warsaw with Russian higher educational institutions due to the isolated status of the former in 1816–31. The article makes an attempt to identify similarities and differences in the functioning of these higher educational institutions on the basis of the documents that regulated the activities of Warsaw and Russian universities. A comparison is made between the structure and organization of the University of Warsaw and other universities of the empire, their collegiate governing bodies, budgets, salaries of professors, admission and terms of study of students, their number, the procedure for awarding academic degrees, etc. The unpopular measures taken by the authorities of the Congress Kingdom of Poland in the field of education in the 1820s, which were accompanied by the increased control over the students and the professors of the university and the attempts to limit its autonomy and divide it into separate higher schools, are shown against the background of the general reactionary policy towards universities. A comparative analysis allows us to draw the following conclusions: the principles of organization of the University of Warsaw and Russian universities that were founded at the beginning of the 19th century had a number of common features, which was associated with borrowing the models of higher educational institutions from Germany and partly from France. Structure, staff and other differences between the educational institutions under consideration were determined by the national features and traditions of Polish education and by greater similarity between the University of Warsaw and the universities of Western Europe. The results obtained contribute to presenting the development of the University of Warsaw in 1816–31 against a broader background and also provide new illustrative material for comparing Russian universities with the “national” universities that existed within the empire.

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