Anna Szołucha, Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth             

“More rights for students, new opportunities for young and talented scholars, a tighter relationship of university with business enterprise and world-class science” – this is how the Polish Minister for Science and Higher Education promotes the new higher education law. When she talks about rights, however, she means the rights typical of a consumerist lifestyle. “The young and talented” sound like ageism and connote an elitist view of higher education; the aims of science become typically business-related through the “relationship with enterprise”; and “world-class science” has always been done in Poland, although it is true that this has usually taken place “in defiance of everything and everyone.”             

 In the past four years of the PO-PSL (the center-right Civic Platform and the centrist, agrarian Polish People’s Party) coalition government in Poland, the actual situation of higher education and science has not changed. During those years, there were a number of minor changes to the laws of 2003 and 2005. Therefore, in order to comment on the state of higher education and science as it is now and as it is likely to be in the nearest future, I can only rely on the official documents about the aims of the reform, the subsequent draft versions of the new law and its final text. Most of the changes introduced by this reform are to take effect from October 1 2011. In this context, I would like to analyze the aims and a few of the concrete legal “solutions” offered by Mrs. Kudrycka (the Minister for Science and Higher Education). I also want to make a few remarks about the debate about the reform.             

If we relied solely on the mainstream media, we might have come to believe that the entire debate about science and higher education focused on two issues: the proposal to abolish habilitation and the introduction of fees for students studying in more than one program (unless a student wanting to do that, would be one from the 10 percent of the “best students”). The biggest success of the reforms would have then been the 51 percent discount for rail tickets for all PhD students. Beyond the mainstream, however, a different and more important debate was taking place. It was about the aims of higher education and science. People discussed different models of academic career paths. They talked about how education and science-making will actually change from now on, that is, if they are going to change at all. Today we know for certain that the language that we use to talk about education has already changed. The debate about aims of science and of the university – although closed down by the new legislation – is being continued in social movements and its renewal  is the one positive thing in which the PO-PSL government happened to play an indirect and most certainly unintended role. [More...]