Page - 125 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 3 ♦  125 tongue by scholars from multinational regions (especially Bohemia, Galicia, and Moravia, as well as, less often, Transylvania and Carniola), who often included it in their curriculum vitae, frequently adding information about their religious denomination as well. The importance of a scholar’s identification did not end with the habilita- tion proposal. In the appointment process, the mother tongue, as an indication of nationality, was considered a more important criterion than citizenship. This was true not only in Galicia and Bohemia but also at German-speaking universities with regard to scholars from Transleithania, as the Hungarian part of the empire had separate citizenship from 1867. Although no formal rules were adopted for scholars born in “Greater Hungary,” the ministry clearly favored them over scholars from abroad and was also willing to offer them high salaries.163 Nevertheless, most scholars born in Greater Hungary who worked at Cisleithanian universities in fact had Austrian citizenship; the children of civil servants serving across the empire were accredited (zuständig) to their fathers’ municipality, and since many civil servants from Cisleithania served in Hungary, a number of their sons were subject to this rule.164 Through the focus on locality and its frequent equation with language, legal practices caused Habsburg scholarship to grow apart. But the structure of disciplines, codified and decided on by the ministry, held the different uni- versities together. Once more, the Privatdozenten were the first people whose careers were influenced by the ministerial decisions concerning disciplinary specialization. A glance at ministerial practice shows that the hierarchy, with Vienna as the main university, also had a major impact on disciplinary differentiation across the empire. Disciplinary Networks While the ministry restricted itself to affirming habilitations and avoided di- rect involvement in faculty procedures, it retained the right to decide in cases where contention arose over which discipline/area the habilitation would be awarded for. From 1888 onward, in particular, the rules were imprecise, leaving open the question of the demarcation between a discipline and a sub- discipline. For example, between 1888 and 1892, the Cracow philosophical faculty and ministerial experts debated whether a scholar could be habili- tated for the narrow field of the morphology and biology of thallophytes and