The phenomenon of the “transformations of the university” (Kwiek, 2010, 2011, 2015) that has been observed over the two past decades is quite complex and it includes a network of sophisticated relations between the global policy, the broadly defined market and the sector of higher education. Problems concerning state funding for universities, the development of competitive and market-oriented educational institutions and, at the same time, the emphasis  on the egalitarisation of higher education and commercialization of contemporary science – these are just some of the indicators of the changes contributing to the erosion of the traditional model of the university.

The transition from universitas studiorum to the corporate production university, noted in the literature, has left its mark on nearly every aspect of academic culture - from the recommended ways to manage the university, through the modification of goals, conditions and methods of education, to radical change of intentions accompanying scientific cognition (Slaughter, Leslie 1997; Melosik 2009; Czerepaniak-Walczak 2013; Górniewicz, Piotrowski 2014; Szadkowski 2015; Sułkowski 2016).

This paper is aimed to show in what ways the systemic and institutional transformations are accompanied by the discursive construction of the identity of “university people”. In short, we are interested to answer the questions: who is included today into the category of the academic community and by what mechanisms? What kind of role do they play and what legitimizes their performance? In what ways the transformations in higher education translate into the discourse of researchers on the academic identity and “university people”? 

The category of “university people” which has been used in research includes all discursive subjects linked to the sector of higher education and science (to a different extent and on various levels, e.g. reforming and managing higher education, carrying out research, conducting classes and participating in them). The detailed content of the category has become the object of our analyses and reconstructions based on the research into scientific discourse of the time of intense reforms of higher education and science in Poland. The theoretical and analytical framework for the conducted research was the Foucauldian concept of dispositif (Foucault 1995, 2010) and the model of the dispositif of the knowledge society (Czyżewski 2012, Ostrowicka 2016). According to this model, the notion of the knowledge society is a normative construct that imposes the discourse order of “useful knowledge”, links between science and social practice and the related claims of various social actors. The dispositif of the knowledge society indicates four potential factors whose mutual relations condition the discursive construction of the category of “university people”. These are the relations between scientific discourses, scientific institutions, business and organization discourses and institutions within the area of ‘practice’ (i.e. companies, central and local governmental agendas, social assistance etc.) The empirical basis for the research included 16 scientific monographs by Polish authors published in the years 2011-2014 (i.e. immediately after the introduction of the higher education reform in Poland) and thematically related to the university and higher education. The main direction of our exploration was emergent and inductive; it was determined by the assumptions of the post-Foucauldian discourse analysis and dispositif (Bührmann et al. 2007; Ostrowicka 2015) within the broader research project entitled “Governmentality of university – a discursive image of the contemporary higher education reform in Poland” (supported by the National Centre of Science in Poland, Grant No 2014/14/E/HS6/00671).

Our research resulted in the reconstruction of the contemporary discursive representations of “university people” and the interpretation of knowledge-power relations – the identities that emerge in the scientific discourse on the idea and direction of the changes in higher education.

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