Higher Education in Turbulent Times. Concluding Reflections

Abstract

This chapter addresses three issues: the context of the European integration and the European challenge for Poland as a new EU member state; the changing structure of higher education, with special reference to autonomy and funding; and the changing dynamics of public/private higher education, politics and demographics. Processes of European integration are viewed here as an environment in which national changes in higher education and research systems have been occurring. In particular, two challenges come to the fore: the recognition of the Qualifications Frameworks as a mechanism of further integration of national systems into a wider European higher education area, and a trend to concentrate European-level frontier research funding in a limited number of research-intensive European universities, as recently suggested by the European Research Council.In the 1990s, a relatively stable social and economic environment in which knowledge was produced in Polish communist-period universities was disintegrating, leading to new institutional and individual “survival strategies” in the higher education sector. New institutional norms and behaviors emerged together with institutional autonomy and academic freedom, regained immediately following the collapse of communism. But autonomy was accompanied by severe financial constraints: long-term, systemic financial austerity was the trademark of university knowledge production in the region throughout the 1990s, and its impact on higher education systems, institutions and individual academics has been substantial. Between 1990 and 2005 there were around a dozen draft laws but only two were passed: the 1990 law introducing new operational parameters of Polish universities, such as institutional autonomy, academic freedom, academic collegiality, and the 2005 law adapting Polish universities to the Bologna Process requirements. In the meantime, there were only small-scale changes introduced as ad-hoc measures. Recent reform attempts introduce, for the first time in the last two decades, fundamentally new rules of the game: for the first time, the state is becoming a clearly distinct, powerful stakeholder with its distinct say in higher education policy.