Page - 207 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 5 ♦  207 provincial government, however, Studyns’kyj was then granted a position at a gymnasium and shortly afterward a fellowship in Cracow. There, he habilitated in the following year and published several articles in Polish.146 Studyns’kyj resided in L’viv but was granted the possibility of traveling to Cracow once a week, which was clearly against the habilitation laws, which required Privatdozenten to live near the city in which they taught.147 After several commissions could find no appropriate candidate for the chair in question,148 the faculty finally proposed Kolessa as an associate professor.149 This was countered, however, by the Galician governor, who suggested “another appropriate scholar,” Studyns’kyj, based on the creden- tials supplied by Cracow.150 The ministry thus requested a new proposal from the faculty that took both their qualifications into account and asked several non-Galician scholars for their expert estimation.151 Notwithstanding this intervention, the faculty proposed Kolessa once more, supported by the opinions of the specialists, who saw him as a more talented and independent thinker. This time, he succeeded in being appointed as an associate professor (in 1898), after the chair had stood vacant for four years. The conflict did not end there, however. In the autumn of 1898, the faculty was once more confronted with this issue, as the Greek Catholic Metropolitan-Ordinariate requested a chair of Old Church Slavonic language at the philosophical faculty, which was strongly supported by the provincial government but opposed by the philosophical faculty. The minister of ed- ucation, Wilhelm von Hartel, proposed instead creating “a second chair of classical philology, alternatively for Ruthenian language and literature with special consideration of Church Slavonic history and literature.”152 The in- stallation of the new chair and nomination of yet another Ruthenian scholar was, unsurprisingly, opposed by the faculty. Polish scholars argued, first, that such a chair would be under church supervision and should be placed at the theological faculty and, second, that a second chair of Ruthenian language was unnecessary, asserting that the ministry should rather create chairs that “relate to the existent needs of the faculty and arise from real scientific needs.”153 Another argument was that since none of the candidates had scholarly qualifications, such a chair should rather be a readership (a lec- tor).154 This was the official position of the majority of the faculty, including Kolessa, who only wanted to augment the proposal with a sentence that the existing chair already covered the matters of the chair in question.155 The remaining Ruthenian professors were not unanimous. Hruševs’kyj argued that the university should rather address a petition for the creation