Page - 127 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 3 ♦  127 specialization, leading to fewer students and thus less money, or move to a larger university. The final obstacle to the professionalization of the Privatdozentur was thus financial. Privatdozenten were approved to teach, but their remuneration remained limited to Collegiengelder, in rare cases improved by regular sala- ries, if proposed by the faculties. This regulation limited young scholars to serving as assistants at the institutes of the university or to being employed and paid externally, unless, of course, their families were well off.169 Further, the regulation that Privatdozenten could not work or live far from the city in which they held a position caused particular problems for the philosophical faculties.170 While in the medical faculties doctors gen- erally had positions in hospitals, which were concentrated in the large cities, or turned to private practice, teachers (the main group from which Privatdozenten were recruited and/or who worked in the philosophical faculties) had much more scattered and unregulated positions. This issue, like many others, was handled differently by different universities and in different cases. While one can find an instance in which three hundred ki- lometers separated the university and the gymnasium where a Privatdozent taught,171 usually faculties accepted only teachers from neighboring cities.172 Obviously, this practice influenced young scholars’ careers, leading them both to and from the capital; faculties were also quite accommodating in this regard, not causing problems if Privatdozenten moved owing to professional relocations and allowing simplified procedures for habilitation at the new university.173 Teaching was, however, not the only para-university occupation of Privatdozenten. There was great diversity in their positions, which, de- pending on the discipline, could be linked to different institutions, such as archives for historians, central bureaus, and so on. In fact, for a number of Privatdozenten, the university was not their primary place of work. They linked their teaching with directorships or curatorships at various institu- tions or taught at technical academies or semi-academic institutions (e.g., the School of Commerce, the School of Industry, and the School of Brewery in Vienna; the Industrial School and Academy of Fine Arts in Galicia; and the Academy of Agriculture in Dubliany/Dublany). The official staff cat- alogs at the end of the nineteenth century listed only around half of the Privatdozenten at philosophical faculties as lacking an additional occupa- tion, although this source is not particularly reliable. The occupational structure of universities displays an interesting spatial differentiation. In Vienna, Prague (especially at the Czech University), and