The demise of the communist system and the introduction of liberal democratic governance in 1989 signalled an official end to Gosplan as a strategy for managing national resources in Poland. This was meant to herald a departure from the dominance of five year planning cycles, performance targets and the ‘propaganda of success’ deployed to mask the inefficiencies of a centrally controlled economic and political system. Polish Universities became, once again, reconnected to Western thought and pre-Soviet ideals of education such as ‘bildung’, or the ‘pedagogy of culture’ (Nawroczyński 1930). Twenty three years later, the present Government’s modernisation agenda is introducing neoliberal performativity measures, which, ironically, resonate with Gosplan thinking. Neoliberal educational ideology, exemplified by the commodification of knowledge for utilitarian aims and scholarship legitimised by citation in the ISI Master Journal database, threaten to eclipse the academic freedoms that flourished in the immediate post 1989 period. This paper is critical of the current modernising trends that are limited to the ‘technologies of Modernity’ (Stronach 2010). By drawing on the Gadamerian concept of ‘conversation’, it is contended that high quality education and scholarship are dialogical and divorced from the calculative, instrumentalist thinking encouraged by the current reform of Polish universities.