Seite - 131 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 3 ♦  131 specialty, but the ministry was not willing to grant him a normal tenured position, because that would mean that his position would be filled after him or that other universities, being on equal terms, would argue for such a chair as well. Medieval history, balneology, and comparative anatomy and plant physiology were fields where the ministry accepted habilitations but refused to establish normal professorships.181 More “exotic” or specialized disci- plines—such as entomology, organic chemistry, paleontology, petrography, plant physiology, neurology and neuropathology, and urology, to name only those that were sanctioned and not-infrequent areas of habilitation—were either changed in the appointment process to cover more general areas or added to general disciplines (e.g., “psychiatry and neurology”). Although there was obvious specialization among professors in the same discipline, which was also required during the appointment process and visible in the lectures they taught, this system inhibited rather than promoted specializa- tion, not only restricting the career opportunities of scholars in nonofficial disciplines but also requiring increasingly broader knowledge. Owing to its large number of parallel chairs, the University of Vienna provided the most possibilities for specialization within its existing struc- tures. These included unofficial specializations, which were, however, clearly taken into account when preparing the proposals for professorships. The most famous is the division of the two Viennese chairs of surgery into one concerned with “small” surgery, the specialty of Johann Heinrich Dumreicher, and one concerned with “large” surgery, the specialization of Theodor Billroth.182 For smaller universities, though, the possibility of spe- cializing was limited by the teaching load, making faculties seek pedagogues rather than researchers; also, paradoxically, these universities would apply for new chairs not because of student overflow but because of the impossi- bility of lecturing at a suitable scientific level. This resulted in the growth of personal and institutional infrastructure at the University of Graz, the University of Innsbruck, and the German Charles-Ferdinand University, but at the expense of the University of Cracow, the University of L’viv, and the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University.183 This was hardly justified by the number of students. For example, in Vienna there were twenty-six students for each professor at the philosophical faculty, while in Innsbruck there were six. Although the statistics seem similar across the universities if one includes the Privatdozenten, smaller universities still had lighter teaching loads (see table 2).