Page - 124 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

124 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 innovation, to appoint a given candidate.159 At the Viennese medical faculty, for example, of the ninety full professors in 1848–1918, a third spent their academic careers exclusively in the Austrian capital. Another third were educated in Vienna, subsequently held a professorship at another Habsburg university, and were eventually transferred back to the capital. Holding to Habsburg tradition was not achieved without conflict, however. The dom- inance of a few disciplines went hand in hand with a lack of specialization in others. Although Habsburg medical faculties had, with a few exceptions, the most advanced specializations among the German-language institu- tions,160 sometimes they struggled to find appropriate specialists among local scholars. One sees this conflict most prominently in pediatric medicine. In the second half of the 1880s, the ministry had to resort to nominating Habsburg general physicians instead of specialists (which the empire lacked at the time) for the chairs in Prague and Graz.161 The prominent pediatrician Hermann Widerhofer protested this measure, claiming that pediatrics was an estab- lished and specialized discipline and that the appointment of inexperienced general physicians caused bafflement and “harm[ed] the scientific dignity” of specialized doctors.162 One can only speculate about what effect the concentration on locality had on these appointments, since locality was hardly an objective mea- surement of the quality of the scholars under consideration. But there was a growth in the use of words such as tradition, continuation, and student. This allows one to speak, especially with regard to the ministry, of a strategy that promoted local scholars or, with the same idea of local improvement, of foreign scholars who could help establish a new subject in the empire. In cases of regional rivalries (Germany vs. Austria, Polish Galicia vs. Austria, Czechs vs. Germans), universities and political institutions gradually rejected the importance of exchange across linguistic boundar- ies. Even if this was not explicitly expressed, academic autarchy within linguistic subsystems was the aim. The addition of the legal issues of citizenship and national identifications created a kind of hierarchy of for- eignness. While for Austrian universities this was, in descending order, “Austrian”—Cisleithanian—Habsburg—German-speaking—others, in Galicia the top positions were reserved for Polish-speaking Galicians and (Habsburg) Silesians, followed by Polish-speaking scholars from Russia and Prussia, other Slavs, and, finally, German-speaking Austrians. These hierarchies were supported by the accentuation of nationality or mother