Polish academics ambivalent about Tusk government one year in

One year after the landmark Polish elections that saw the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party lose power, academics have mixed feelings about progress under the coalition government led by prime minister Donald Tusk, with relief at freedom from “ideological pressures” accompanying frustrations over insufficient research funding.

“We were very optimistic about the possibility for change, but today there is slight disappointment among Polish academics,” Michał Bilewicz, director of the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw, told Times Higher Education. “What we received is a situation where science is not perceived as a priority by the government.”

With the end of eight years of PiS rule came the end of the “open harassment” of academics researching subjects the government considered to be “anti-Polish”, Dr Bilewicz said, such as the role of the country’s non-Jewish population in the genocide of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Dr Bilewicz himself has seen his promotion to full professor repeatedly blocked by Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, from PiS, whose term will end in 2025.

The new coalition government does not appear to be immune, however, to political interference in academia, Dr Bilewicz said, pointing to the replacement earlier this year of computer scientist Piotr Sankowski as head of the Ideas NCBR research institute for artificial intelligence.

Subsequently, science minister Dariusz Wieczorek announced that a new AI research institute would be established under Professor Sankowski’s leadership, a move Dr Bilewicz described as “promising”.

Dariusz Stola, a history professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Political Studies, said planned reforms of the academy, via a draft law released in July, prompted fears that the government “wanted to reduce the autonomy” of the institution. The proposed law “was really poor”, Professor Stola said, while noting that the government appeared to have abandoned the plans after “widespread outcry”.

Natalia Letki, an associate professor at the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, said some of the coalition’s pledges to undo the work of its predecessor have yet to come to fruition. For instance, under former science minister Przemysław Czarnek, Poland’s research evaluation framework heavily promoted journals and publishers that were ideologically aligned with PiS.

“The academic community has hoped for a reform of the evaluation system to correct for [Professor Czarnek’s] modifications, but despite the minister’s promises, this is still to happen,” Dr Letki said.

Low pay remains a concern across academia, said Dr Letki. “The academic sector has received a substantive salary rise by about 30 per cent, but this has only really corrected for inflation,” she said. Professor Stola, meanwhile, described “a humiliating discrepancy between the funding for humanities and the funding for hard sciences”.

“It’s difficult, but they could have started some sort of systematic, comprehensive effort to produce a better funding system,” he said.

The proposed budget for 2025 will not boost investment in the National Science Centre, Poland’s main research funder, Dr Bilewicz said, while the institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences “are performing very high-quality research, but they’re not receiving sufficient funding”. Ministers, he said, “don’t really view research and development as an opportunity for the economic growth of the country”.

Next year’s presidential elections could prove the real test for Mr Tusk's government: with constitutional limits necessitating the departure of Mr Duda, 2025 could see the appointment of a liberal candidate, leaving PiS unable to block any coalition reforms.

“If they win the presidential election, we will see how much determination they have to restore democratic principles, as they promised last year,” Professor Stola said.

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com