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This paper analyzes changing higher education policies in Poland in the last two decades. It argues that top Polish public universities became divided, with different individual academic and institutional trajectories in the academic fields in which educational expansion occurred (social sciences) and in fields in which it was much less pronounced (natural sciences). Using the concepts drawn from new institutionalism in organizational studies, this paper views the 1990s as the period of the deinstitutionalization of traditional academic rules and norms in public universities, with growing uncertainty about the core of the academic identity. In the expansion era (1990--2005), prestigious public research universities became excessively teaching-oriented. In the period of educational contraction, their currently teaching-oriented segments are expected to become research-intensive. New legislation grounded in an instrumental view of higher education is interpreted as a return to a traditional academic normative consensus, with increased emphasis on, and funding for, the research mission. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

This paper focuses on the inequality in academic knowledge production and finds the productivity distribution patterns across European systems to be strikingly similar, despite starkly different national academic traditions. The upper echelons of highly productive academics (the upper 10 percent of academics who are ranked highest in terms of their publishing performance in 11 European countries) provide, on average, almost half of all academic knowledge production. The primary data analyzed comes from the large-scale global CAP and European EUROAC research projects on the academic profession (“Changing Academic Profession” and “Academic Profession in Europe”), with 13,908 usable cases of research-involved academics. In particular, the data studied in this paper refer to a subpopulation of highly productive academics (N=1,583), contrasted with a subpopulation of 90 percent of the remaining academics (N=12,325). If a research question can be “the theoretical or empirical puzzle that motivates a given study” (Brady and Collier 2010: 347), then our study was motivated by the puzzle of the impact of highly productive academics on overall European publishing output. In short, the inequality in academic knowledge production in Europe is as follows: about 10 percent of academics – termed research top performers here – produce on average almost half (45.9 percent) of all articles, and 20 percent produce two-thirds of them (65.4 percent). The remaining 80 percent of academics produce on average only about one third of all articles (34.6 percent). If the research-active segment of the European academic profession is divided into two halves, the upper most productive half produces almost all the articles (94.1 percent), and the lower most productive half produces less than 6 percent. From a gender perspective, the proportion of male academics among research top performers is higher (three out of four) than that of female academics but “productivity concentration indexes” for both genders (linking the percentages of male and female top performers to the percentages of all male and all female academics in national systems) clearly show that the role of highly productive female academics is much higher than traditionally assumed in the literature on social stratification in science. This paper provides another, this time large-scale and cross-national, corroboration of the systematic inequality in knowledge production, for the first time argued for by Alfred Lotka (1929) and Derek de Solla Price (1963). We show here that the traditional stratification of the academic profession based on different publishing patterns still holds across Europe.

Twentieth-century massification of higher education and academic research led to mission diversification and structural diversification of national higher education systems (HESs), but also a tendency of non-university colleges to seek to develop into full-scale universities by the emulation of practices of established academic organizations, a tendency that has been called academic drift. The drift as such can have multiple causes, and in this article, we relate academic drift to the concepts of institutional logics and isomorphism from neoinstitutional organization theory, delineating policy-making, norm shifts and organizational action in response to uncertainty as three component processes of academic drift. Using the case of the organizational field of the Swedish HES and its recent 35-year history, we draw both empirical and theoretical conclusions, and demonstrate the weight of the research mission in the building of institutional legitimacy for university colleges.

The paper locates the past two decades of changes in Polish universities in a comparative European context. It shows a wider transition: from an expanding, privatized and disciplinarily divided university of the 1990s to a publicly funded, increasingly contracting and stratified university of the 2000s (and beyond). The gradual political and economic integration of Poland with the European Union has been accompanied by the gradual integration of the Polish higher education system with Western European systems. The paper argues that the major emergent parameter of higher education policy is demographics and that the remonopolization of the system by the tax-based public sector and the gradual decline of the private sector are transforming the system beyond recognition. Processes of ‘de-privatization’ or ‘republicization’ are gradually replacing recent processes of ‘privatization’. Powerful systemic changes in university governance and funding modes are bound to shatter the relative stability of the academic profession. After two decades of being fundamentally different due to the communist legacy (i.e. being ‘post-communist’), selected Polish universities, owing to accelerating processes of academic stratification linked to the 2009–2012 wave of reforms, have a chance to become fully blown elements of a European knowledge production landscape, with increasingly similar governance and funding regimes and the similarly research-involved academic profession.

The paper links several interrelated processes in Central and Eastern European higher education: expansion through two types of privatization (external: new private providers, and internal, public universities charging fees in a nominally free public sector), severe fiscal constraints limiting further tax-based growth of higher education, and the gradual denigration of the research mission of universities caused by almost two decades of their continuous focus on the teaching mission and by general underfunding of university research in the region. Long-term consequences of the unprecedented growth of the private sector in Poland in the two decades of 1990-2010 are studied, with special emphasis on the consequences of accompanying processes of the deinstitutionalization of the university research mission taking place in public universities: the decreasing role of traditional academic institutional rules and norms and traditional institutional patterns of academic behavior in Polish universities in the period. A new wave of reforms in Poland (2008-2011) is discussed, as possibly leading to substantially revised rules, norms and patterns of institutional behavior. Poland, with 31.5% of student enrollments in the private sector in 2010 (out of 1.84 million students), provides a unique case to study the two decades of demand-absorbing growth of private higher education with all its advantages and, as mostly discussed in the present chapter, limitations. The overall context of the chapter is the emphasis on further expansion of higher education in Europe argued for by both knowledge economy theories and (repeatedly) by the European Commission policy documents, with a policy wish to close the enrollment gap between the European Union and the USA. Finally, the chapter presents conclusions and directions for further research. Experimenting with privatization in higher education, substantially increasing access to it in the last ten to fifteen years, were especially strong in Central European systems, Poland being the biggest system in the region and the most notable example. New “public-private dynamics” (Enders and Jongbloed 2007), in various forms, emerges in Europe and the chapter focuses on those systems which have used privatization processes for the expansion of their higher education in the context of increasingly competitive public funding for all public services generally, not only for higher education. Especially, the chapter studies the long-term consequences of the expansion through privatization for the system as a whole and for public sector institutions.