Until the 20th century, higher education in Europe was governed by two main actors – the state and the academic community. The recent decades have seen the rise of what Hans Weiler calls a “new game” in higher education (Weiler, 2000, p. 333). While the old game was a “straightforward and rather boring affair” (Weiler 2000, p. 333) involving only two players, there is now a third player in the game called “the market”.

The new player proved most assertive in Central and Eastern Europe, where a market-oriented conception of higher education was promoted in the post-communist transition by institutions such as the World Bank, OECD, and the Soros Foundation (Weiler, 2000). In the wake of the political transformation, market-based principles were incorporated into legislation across the region to expand higher education provision and access. In Poland in particular, reforms of the early 1990s followed the market-based model of higher education (Clark, 1986). The state set the sector loose, adopting a  neo-liberal “policy of no policy”. Neo-institutional scholars predicted that higher education (HE) in Poland would continue to converge towards a market-based model of HE governance, especially as they joined the Bologna Process. These predictions, however, have not come true.

Left to themselves by the state in the post-communist transition, universities reverted back to the “Humboldtian” tradition of they had known before World War II, emphasizing higher education as a public good, and the university as a guardian of the European humanist tradition. In an era of enormous massification, the academic establishment in Poland remained strongly attached to the notions of academic self-rule in a disinterested quest for new knowledge, without specific purpose to social or economic development (Szostek, 2004; Maliszewski, 2007).

The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors accounting for the persistence of the “Humboldtian” model of the university in a country that had otherwise been a model of policy convergence towards the market model (Dobbins, 2011). 

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