Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)

János Ugrai: „THE PERIOD OF NATIONAL ADVANCEMENT” 1777-1849 - The school-forging law professor - Sándor Kövy

Kossuth will someday be a national insurrectionist!” The second instance of renown issuing from an exchange between Kossuth and Kövy is of a positive nature, full of acknowledgement, although the rigorous professor did not deny his character this time, either. Having heard the excellent answer which Kossuth and his classmate had offered to an examination question, Kövy not only lauded the young men but also fulminated at the “professionals” at central offices in terms hardly inviolable in official circumstances (viz. at a school examination): “... these two young men here know the law better than the entire Royal High Court, which is constituted of ignorant high priests, barons and assistant governors without them having been examined.”

The legacy which Sándor Kövy left behind, first and foremost, as a teacher and to a lesser extent as an academic, grew to such proportions that, by the end of his life - despite his conservative viewpoint in neology - it was clear that he would be Sárospataké representative in the academy movement. However, the honor befell him rather belatedly. Due to his deteriorating health, he was able to participate on only two occasions in the discussions pertaining to the formal establishment of the movement after which he asked to resign his mandate. He did not live long enough to see his colleagues submitting the founding documents to the sovereign, having passed away four days previously.

Having served as a teacher for a long time - for more than three and a half decades - paved the way for Kövy to attain an exceptional situation as a professor in Patak. In popularity, fame and wealth alike, he far surpassed the local average person. Yet, several factors prevented him from attaining even greater, veritably lasting achievements. The generally underdeveloped level of the discipline of law and its instruction itself is the first to be cited, something which required that he invest the major scope of his knowledge and energy into the writing of appropriate textbooks and thus being unable to pursue independent and original research. A second factor was that his unparalleled popularity to a large extent stemmed from the primitive conditions of his local environment. Hardly anyone else was able to deliver material to the students in any way near with the quality and breadth which he did, and, as a consequence, he was constantly in contact with an inordinate number of students. This obviously enhanced his renown, authority and financial situation but, at the same time, hindered him in being truly creative in his field. And as it happened, he did not live long enough to experience the exceptional opportunity of becoming a member of the Academy. The final factor to be mentioned is the one of the limitations imposed on him by his station, that of the noble class. On the basis of the position he took in the clashes encompassing the neology issue and in the views expressed in his distancing himself and opposing the radicalization which evolved within the Pánczél county association, a case can be made to say that Sándor Kövy, the professor who educated numerous prominent personalities of the political generation which ushered in the Age of Reforms, would have been decidedly more content to have overseen the foundations of feudalism reinforced. Thus, his role in advancing the development of a modern civil society was, at best, less than half intentional.

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Lajos Kossuth and Bertalan Szemere were Kövy's most famous students