Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - A Decade-long Struggle for the Academy of Law
SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 164 Dániel Emődy had the possibility of studying Hungarian literature and - thanks to the College’s doctor - forensic pathology and autopsy methods. This positive development, however, meant the opposite for the Faculty of Humanities which lost six hours of weekly class instruction when the professor of history was assigned to teach Hungarian constitutional and legal history at the law school. The professor of natural law also ended up providing five hours of instruction per week at the law school. These efforts paid off in the end as the MNER granted the school ful accreditation. This now meant that all the students who successfully completed their fourth year of study could apply to take the final examination without being required to take any extra classes. Upon successfully passing the final examination, candidates were fully certified to assume the status of lawyer in its highest form, that of solicitor. Those students who completed only three years of study in Patak and then moved to nearby cities (Kassa or Eperjes) to pass their state examinations at the Court were also considered fully graduated. Thus the Academy of Law and Political Sciences became a fully functional and proper academy with a four-year program of education. Unfortunately, the professors at Patak could not enjoy the success for long. After only five short years, dark clouds began to gather above them once again. Dániel Emődy was the general director of the school when news arrived that the MNER was considering further changes to improve quality and thus introducing more restrictions on the school. The notion was loosely connected to the idea of establishing a second university in the country. On the one hand, the teachers at Patak welcomed the idea of a new university in Kolozsvár and, in general, they were positive about the planned improvements targeting quality. On the other hand, however, they raised their voice publicly against the state providing financial support to denominationally Catholic law schools and not to Protestant schools. In the midst of this situation, the idea of closing down the university in Patak surfaced again but, obviously it was not supported by the professors of Patak who claimed that the region, the church, academic education and cultural life in general would suffer from such a decision. They suggested at the meeting of the General Protestant Convent that the church districts should keep their own law schools or combine them all together into a single national and denominational institution as a possible solution to the problem. Had the latter proposal been accepted, the site of the single institution clearly would not have been Patak, which meant that, by the end of the 1870s, the professors at Patak reluctantly accepted the idea that the teaching of law on the banks of the Bodrog River would cease for good, but with very strict conditions. This dip of fortune was also reflected in the number of students enrolled: in 1882, there were only forty-two students studying at the Academy of Law. Ten years later the issue flared up again. A telling sign was that the MNER organized general meetings to discuss the unacceptable status of legal education in the country but the professors from the four Reformed Church law schools were not invited. They were informed only afterwards of the arrangement which was ratified: the doctoral degree was no longer to be a prerequisite for a legal career, the different prerequisites for state administration, judiciary and legal professions were to be eliminated, a unified state examination was to be introduced and new committees were to be constituted for the examination. According to the draft proposal, final state examinations could only be taken
