Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility within Higher Education in Socialist Poland

“Academia is the esoteric domain of the intellectual aristocracy,” Agata Zysiak quotes the sociologist Józef Chałasiński as saying (p. 148). Why this continued to be the case under socialism, in a context ripe for reform, is the question that drives Zysiak's study. Indeed, it is hard to think of a place better situated for monumental educational reform than post-World War II Poland, where the political will under early socialism coalesced in a way that allowed for the championing of students from marginalized class backgrounds. And within Poland there is no better place to imagine as an incubator for change than the University of Łódź, a newly formed, progressive institution at the heart of an industrial city. Yet this didn't happen. Despite a variety of affirmative action-type programs meant to provide greater access and foment structural transformation, the university remained a profoundly liberal institution.The tensions at play—between liberal and socialist visions of higher education, between the reproduction of the status quo and opportunities for social advancement—propel Zysiak's study. Importantly, Zysiak approaches those competing ideals not, as she puts it, through the lens of totalitarianism, which sees Stalinist reforms as an imposition from above and afar, nor as a form of seduction, without downplaying the transformative potential of the moment. Instead, she interprets both the opportunities and ultimate stasis to evaluate the stickiness of universities as cultural sites that protect elite privilege and support social reproduction. Those dynamics, Zysiak argues, worked in tandem in a way that allowed for a moment of ultimately ill-fated emancipatory change. As such, this work fits in nicely with scholarly trends that consider the successes and failures of early socialism (Katherine Lebow's Unfinished Utopia) and the ways that elite cultural capital shapes institutions (Longina Jakubowska's Patrons of History). Limiting Privilege also revisits John Connelly's arguments in Captive University, with an eye to ground-level applications of policy.Zysiak casts a wide and interdisciplinary methodological net: by tracking discursive shifts in popular media, policy changes at the state level, and the stability of academic self-narratives. Chapter 1 charts higher education in interwar Poland, which featured institutions crafted in the image of their German counterparts. Proponents of this so-called “liberal” model saw the university as a site of knowledge production for its own sake, one where professors—who came almost exclusively from intellectual backgrounds—had autonomy over their research and saw the pursuit of knowledge as the end goal of education. Chapter 2 tracks the potential for changes in educational structures generally in Poland, and specifically in Łódź, in the wake of World War II. With the destruction of cityscapes across the country and large-scale demographic shifts, notably involving the labor migration of peasants, working-class Łódź was primed as a site for educational reform. Chapter 3 then compares opposing models of universities in the form of two rectors at the University of Łódź, Tadeusz Kotarbiński and the aforementioned Józef Chałasiński. The Kotarbiński/Chałasiński comparison captures the competing visions of liberal versus socialist models of education, with the latter looking to higher education as a force for social good in the quest to create a more egalitarian society. Significantly, this meant the reorganization of university life. New categories of academic rank, combined with preferred admissions, preparatory courses, and the sponsoring of research related to labor needs, featured in higher education in those early years of socialist experimentation.With the stage set, the remainder of the book evaluates the inroads and limitations of the model socialist university. Chapter 4 zeroes in on how the language of the media championed the university as a progressive and egalitarian institution, which in turn, for Zysiak, helps provide insight into the construction of the new social imaginary. Chapters 5 and 6 then move to the experiences of students at the University of Łódź. The heart of this section focuses on data collection and more specifically on the studies sponsored in the 1960s by the Department of Sociology at the University of Łódź that attempted to measure the impact of educational reforms. While the first years of reform saw some gains in opening admission to students from peasant and working-class backgrounds—Zysiak notes that by the early 1950s, upwards of 47 percent of students came from the targeted classes—those achievements were tempered by limitations on courses of study and the lack of connection between study and intended professional track. For students from peasant and working-class backgrounds, vocational and technical schools often provided better opportunities for economic stability, without the social drawbacks and attendant disillusionment of the university experience. Subsequent generations of students from marginalized backgrounds dropped out at dramatically higher rates (around 40 percent, compared to the 3–4 percent of the first generation of postwar students). Chapters 7 and 8 attempt to answer why the level of attrition for those students spiked. Looking at self-narratives of academics, separated into the narratives of academics from intellectual and peasant or working-class backgrounds, Zysiak moves beyond raw numbers to examine the forces of social reproduction in academia, and those forces run deep and are based on liberal ideas of the pursuit of universal knowledge. “Attributing superior values to scholarship and a unique mission to academics has a very clear class function,” writes Zysiak. “It is a distinction that ensures the reproduction of the cultural arbitrary of the dominant classes” (p. 143). The minimal differences between the elements found in autobiographies of faculty from intellectual backgrounds when compared to faculty from peasant or working-class backgrounds reveals the pull of cultural capital in academia. The change that took place wasn't within the university, but rather within the identities of working-class faculty who adapted to the unwritten rules of the field.The implications of Zysiak's conclusions thus reach beyond Polish studies to consider how deep the roots of the liberal university lie. Even in these most favorable of circumstances—an environment where government officials embraced higher education's potential in facilitating upward mobility and where university officials implemented a variety of egalitarian reforms—the model of the liberal university triumphed. Zysiak, paying attention to the wider educational pipeline, thus notes how difficult accessibility can be. It is here that the sociological concepts of the study prove most valuable. Not only would reformers need to sponsor educational opportunities at the elementary and secondary level if they wanted to affect change at universities, they would have also needed to contend with a cultural environment that had (and has) tremendous inertia.While these results are sobering—there are no easy fixes to be found—the study nonetheless should be on the reading list of anyone who wishes to understand the intersection of educational policy and the university as a cultural institution, as well as those interested in the dynamics of early socialism and innovative sociological-historical approaches to scholarship. Those invested in making universities accessible will find Limiting Privilege an invaluable read.