Co z nami będzie?
What will become of us?

Summary/Abstract: Recent changes in the sciences and higher education in Poland are aimed at improving the quality of academic work by forcing researchers and academic institutions to compete. These changes include introducing requirements to quantify and evaluate the results of research and teaching. This approach, especially in the humanities, leads to a narrowing of the range of projects to those that can be expected to receive a good score – and thus financing – because a significant part of the positive effects resulting from the functioning of academic institutions is difficult to operationalise, measure and evaluate. Nevertheless, in the Polish context, free-market reforms could have a progressive character if they were able to overcome the entrenched feudalism of our academic world. Unfortunately, the neo-liberal character of the Polish educational reforms does not offer much hope in solving this problem and is likely to lead to the modernization of its backwardness rather than to the elimination of it. The author argues that a necessary element of an effective reform of Polish higher education is breaking up the informal networks of interests and support that corrupt the academic sector in Poland.

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