Page - 129 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 3 ♦  129 of the Innsbruck Privatdozenten were appointed as professors throughout the monarchy. The hierarchically oriented regulative system had, however, a serious consequence: the symbolic centralization of disciplinary boundaries, largely defined in relation to the central universities in Prague and Vienna. In 1904, as the philosophical faculty of the Czech University in Prague applied to appoint Jindřich Matiegka as the chair of anthropology, the ministry took into consideration that neither such a chair nor such an institute existed in Vienna. Hence, it opposed creating an official chair but granted Matiegka the title of associate professor (but no salary). Then in 1908, shortly after an associate professorship was created in Vienna, Matiegka was granted a paid associate professor position.176 A similar case occurred in the field of hygiene, for which a chair was established first in Vienna (1875)177 and then almost ten years later in Cracow, Graz, and Prague.178 In the most important disciplines at the medical faculty, the universi- ties in Prague and Vienna were almost always among the three faculties in which new disciplines first appeared and were sanctioned by professorships. Dermatology (together with syphidology) and bacteriology were the only ones where they were not the first (see also appendices 1 and 2). The for- mer, however, already existed under the name of syphidology, and the latter was used to denote habilitation disciplines only in Slavic universities. A similar picture emerges if one considers fields that did not become formally established disciplines but advanced as areas of habilitation: radiology, elec- trotherapy, and orthopedics. In philosophical faculties, the situation was more complicated because of the much more flexible designations, but the central universities were again the disciplinary precursors. Only the historical disciplines, with early specialization in Innsbruck, and Slavic historiographies and languages showed a slightly different picture. Surprisingly, a large number of disci- plinary pioneers were unsuccessful and ceased to teach after only few years. While some of them were in fields that never really achieved the formal status of an academic discipline, others failed in disciplines that became common academic subjects only a few years later. While it is impossible to say whether this was due to the personalities of these scholars or the conser- vatism of university structures, it is clear that acceptance of a new discipline was a delicate matter. The pioneers of academic disciplinary differentiation who did succeed were those who enlarged or changed their designated specialization during