Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth 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.
Austrian rule 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. Instead, it operated as a high school. The university was reopened in 1817. 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. (), 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, The university's library acquired, among others, the collection of 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: • Theology – 222 students • Law – 2,978 students • Medicine – 638 students (together with the Pharmaceutical Section, which had 263 students) • Humanities – 892 students • Mathematics and Biology – 870 students Altogether, during the academic year 1934/35, there were 5900 students at the university, consisting by religious observance of: • 3793 Roman Catholics (64.3%) • 1211 Jews (20.5%) • 739
Ukrainian Greek-Catholics (12.5%) • 72 Orthodox (1.2%) • 67 Protestants (1.1%) 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.
World War II 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 , 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. Polish professors and administrative assistants were increasingly fired 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 university reopened. and most of the Polish academics from the University of Jan Kazimierz relocated to Wrocław (former
Breslau), where they filled positions in the newly established Polish institutions of higher learning. The buildings of the university had survived the war undestroyed, however, 80% of its pre-war student and academic body was gone. The traditions of Jan Kazimierz University have been duplicated at the
University of Wrocław, which replaced the pre-war University of Breslau after the German inhabitants of that city had been
expelled following Stalin's establishing Germany's eastern border farther to the west.
Ukrainian SSR Following the
Soviet annexation of Western Ukraine in September 1939, Lviv University was nationalized and integrated into the educational system of the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In October 1939 the institution was reorganized as Lviv State University, and in January 1940 it was renamed Ivan Franko Lviv State University by decree of the
Presidium of the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR. The new authorities pursued a policy of rapid
Sovietization and formal “
Ukrainization”:
Marxism–Leninism and political economy were introduced into the curriculum, Ukrainian was declared the main language of instruction, and several prominent Ukrainian scholars from other regions of the republic were appointed to the teaching staff, while a number of Polish professors continued to work at the university. At the same time, the university was affected by
Stalinist repression: several waves of arrests targeted faculty and students, particularly Polish academics and suspected Ukrainian nationalists, and in January 1940 a show trial was staged against 59 alleged members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, many of them students of the university. After the end of the Second World War and the restoration of Soviet rule in Lviv in 1944, Ivan Franko Lviv State University reopened and entered a prolonged period of expansion as one of the leading universities of the Ukrainian SSR. By the 1950s and 1960s new faculties, including journalism, applied mathematics and cybernetics, were established, the student body grew rapidly and the university developed a broad network of research institutes and laboratories. During the postwar decades the university also played a central role in the
Russification and ideological control of higher education in Western Ukraine: instruction in many disciplines gradually shifted from Ukrainian to Russian, courses in Marxism–Leninism and the history of the
Communist Party were compulsory, and scholars who departed from the official line risked sanctions or dismissal. Despite ideological pressure, Lviv University remained an important centre of Ukrainian humanities and natural sciences and a locus of dissent in the region. Historians, philologists and philosophers associated with the university made significant contributions to Ukrainian national historiography and literary studies, often working within the constraints of Soviet censorship. From the 1960s onwards, clandestine groups of Ukrainian students circulated
samizdat literature and maintained contacts with dissident circles; several staff and graduates were later counted among the Ukrainian human rights movement and the leaders of the national-democratic revival of the late 1980s. By the time of Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, Ivan Franko Lviv State University had a student body of more than 14,000 and a staff of over 1,000 academics.
Independent Ukraine The
proclamation of the independence of Ukraine in 1991 brought about radical changes in every sphere of university life. Professor, Doctor
Ivan Vakarchuk, a renowned scholar in the field of theoretical physics, was rector of the university from 1990 to 2013. Meeting the requirements arising in recent years new faculties and departments have been set up: the Faculty of International Relations and the Faculty of Philosophy (1992), the Faculty of Pre-Entrance University Preparation (1997), the Chair of Translation Studies and Comparative Linguistics (1998). Since 1997 the following new units have come into existence within the teaching and research framework of the university: the Law College, The Humanities Centre, The Institute of Literature Studies, and The Italian Language and Culture Resource Centre. The teaching staff of the university has increased amounting to 981, with scholarly degrees awarded to over two-thirds of the entire teaching staff. There are over one hundred laboratories and working units as well as the Computing Centre functioning here. The Zoological, Geological, Mineralogical Museums together with those of Numismatics, Sphragistics, and Archeology are stimulating the interests of students. == Faculties ==