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Chapter 3 ♦ 121
it even started. A letter concerning such permission was to be enclosed in
every habilitation proposal. Although no instances of such a refusal were
noted, this certainly supported the trend of habilitating under one’s own
teacher, as other professors might oppose younger competitors’ access to
materials, instruments, and research aids they had gathered, especially if
they had assistants striving for a career as well. In one case, the withdrawal
of the right to use an institute’s facilities led to the exclusion of a scholar
from the university, effectively ending his academic career: in 1905 the
archaeologist Arthur Mahler was forbidden from using the facilities at the ar-
chaeological institute directed by Wilhelm Klein in Prague. The reasons
had, as the rector wrote,
to do neither with the person [of Mahler], nor with his scientific or
teaching activity. The reasons [for forbidding Mahler to use facilities
of the archaeological institute] are caused by special139 conditions
at the University of Prague, which have been hard or impossible to
eliminate. Professor Klein saw it as his duty to ascertain that poten-
tial conflicts among students over the question whether a docent of a
non-German nationality is acceptable or unacceptable at the German
University in Prague are not carried out in the presence of his pre-
cious collections.140
It is clear in spite of the veiled terminology that Klein’s denial of access
resulted from the protests and even assaults by German-national students
on Mahler, a politically active Zionist intellectual. I return to the influence
of street conflicts on universities in more detail in chapter 6; for now it
should be clear that professors could end the careers of Privatdozenten if
they wished, as Klein obviously did in the case of the unfortunate Mahler.
Most habilitation records are very short and formal and refer to para-
graphs of the law in cases of rejection; the reason for rejection was usually
the poor quality of the candidate’s scientific publications or his lack of suit-
ability for teaching. Seldom are the reasons more thoroughly explained. For
example, in the case of the Tyrolean inventor Anton Nagy, his paper on the
therapeutic use of a combustion turbine and his wording in the documents
moved the referents to conclude that the applicant was not a “mentally nor-
mal person.”141
The dry style prevailing in documents sent to the ministry points to
another feature of the habilitation system, which was its gradual profes-
sionalization and, hence, the importance of personal connections. Those
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Buch Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space"
Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918
A Social History of a Multilingual Space
- Titel
- Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918
- Untertitel
- A Social History of a Multilingual Space
- Autor
- Jan Surman
- Verlag
- Purdue University Press
- Ort
- West Lafayette
- Datum
- 2019
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- PD
- ISBN
- 978-1-55753-861-1
- Abmessungen
- 16.5 x 25.0 cm
- Seiten
- 474
- Schlagwörter
- History, Austria, Eduction System, Learning
- Kategorien
- Geschichte Vor 1918
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- List of Illustrations vi
- List of Tables vii
- Acknowledgments ix
- Note on Language Use, Terminology, and Geography xi
- Abbreviations xiii
- Introduction A Biography of the Academic Space 1
- Chapter 1 Centralizing Science for the Empire 19
- Chapter 2 The Neoabsolutist Search for a Unified Space 49
- Chapterr 3 Living Out Academic Autonomy 89
- Chapter 4 German-Language Universities between Austrian and German Space 139
- Chapter 5 Habsburg Slavs and Their Spaces 175
- Chapter 6 Imperial Space and Its Identities 217
- Chapter 7 Habsburg Legacies 243
- Conclusion Paradoxes of the Central European Academic Space 267
- Appendix 1 Disciplines of Habilitation at Austrian Universities 281
- Appendix 2 Databases of Scholars at Cisleithanian Universities 285
- Notes 287
- Bibliography 383
- Index 445