After the Bohemian King Joseph II's reforms in the 1770s the university became increasingly state-directed, and today it is a public university. During the Revolution of 1848 university students and professors played an active role on the side of democratisation. The conservative king Francis Joseph I closed most of its faculties during the 1850s, but they were reopened by an act of the Interim National Assembly passed on 21 February 1946. This act also extended the name from "University of Olomouc" to "Palacký University Olomouc", after František Palacký, a 19th-century Moravian historian and politician.