Issue of this presentation signs in the aims of research project being implemented within the grant of National Centre of Science, titled Governmentality of University – a Discursive Image of the Contemporary Higher Education Reform in Poland.
The primary purpose of the paper is to portray an axis of visibility “problems” connected with university and higher education in scientific discourse in 2011-2014 in Poland. This particular period of time is important in view of the intensified public discussion on the shape of contemporary university due to the higher education reform introduced by the Act of the 18th March, 2011 on the amendment to the Law on Higher Education, Academic Degrees and Title and Degrees and Title in Art. We perceive these events – in accordance with Foucault’s analytics – as an ultimate point where knowledge-power reveals itself through its results, and as such is more visible and susceptible to examination.
In Poland, the issue of changes in higher education is mainly undertaken in the critical and political perspectives, and less frequently in the empirical one. Critical analyses of the changes introduced within the framework of the Bologna process and the creation of the European Higher Education Area frequently raise the problem of commercialization and transition to the “market-oriented” knowledge and higher education, based on “the paradigm of usefulness”. Adopting Foucault’s assumption about the discursive nature of social reality, we perceive the debate about the status and the role of university as “a struggle for meanings” and an attempt to implement in society particular versions of knowledge and academic education at the expense of their alternative versions. In this context, M. Kwiek’s pertinent observation that „never before has the UE educational policy set such similar goals and tasks and used such similar, though completely new in comparison to the previous decades, concepts and categories (e.g. employability, equality of access, partnerships with enterprises, education bonus, rate of return to education, education results, mobility, copayment, etc.)” seems to take on particular importance (Kwiek 2010, p. 3).
The period of preparation for the reform of the Minister B. Kudrycka, and then the process of its implementation was vividly interpreted and discussed in the public discourse. In our research we are interested in the analysis of (re) production of knowledge about the university (what is perceived ?, what is referred to?, what remains in the shadow?) in academic discourse is specified place and historical time.
We undertake the analysis through the categories of continuity and change. Starting from the concepts of "knowledge" and "scientific discourse" in which and through which manufactured and distributed the knowledge of the university, we will answer the following research questions:
1. What elements (resources) of university tradition are seen by academics as worth maintaining and continuing?
2. How and where does the discourse of change appear?
3. In what terms is scientific discourse about university resistant to present-day rhetoric of Europeization?
The category of knowledge we understand broadly, according to the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, i. e. by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, also knowledge understood in Foucault’s way as indivisible compilation of knowledge-power which reach their terms in the discourse. This kind of studies of discourse trend of combining these two perspectives (sociology if knowledge and M. Foucault’ s conception) are intensively developed on German soil, i. e. by Reiner Keller.
