The Changing Paths in Academic Careers in European Universities: Minor Steps and Major Milestones

Academic generations and academic work: patterns of attitudes, behaviors, and research productivity of Polish academics after 1989

“…The conclusions from Polish interviews are not that much different from those reached in Teichler's (2014, 62) recent study of German university professors: 'junior academic staff and senior academic staff seem to have little in common with respect to job security, composition of tasks and influence in academia. ' Young academics across Europe see emergent tensions between insecure, often contract-based employment, modest academic salaries and mounting publishing pressures (Brechelmacher et al 2015;Kwiek and Antonowicz 2015). The traditional tradeoff between higher salaries in competitive workplaces and lower salaries in secure academic workplaces does not seem to work anymore.…”

“…Poland should adjust its governance structures, and especially its academic career requirements and individual and institutional assessment procedures, to the changing European realities in which for top public universities academic research increasingly matters, and the differentiation of the system along teaching-research lines is on the rise (Brechelmacher et al 2015;Kwiek and Antonowicz 2015). The undifferentiated, teaching-focused, internationally uncompetitive, low research-productive and semi-feudal system of two separate academic casts is simply ineffective.…”

“…Behind an aggregated picture provided by a quantitative analysis, there is also a more individualized picture based on interviews. The interviews reveal Polish universities as a battlefield between the 'independent' and the 'subordinate' academic ranks (the turning point being Habilitation, see Pinheiro and Antonowicz 2014;Kwiek and Antonowicz 2015). In a word: 'battlefield relationships' between two academic estates, divided both symbolically and economically, are repeatedly reported to rule the academic world (12/Under 40).…”

The unfading power of collegiality? University governance in Poland in a European comparative and quantitative perspective

“…Germany, Ireland, Poland, Switzerland) could also be useful. Although we decided not to refer directly to the qualitative material available, our study is indirectly underpinned by about 500 interview reports based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with academics which followed a common interview protocol, and especially in 60 in-depth interviews with Polish academics conducted in 2011 by Dr. Dominik Antonowicz (for comparative analyses mostly based on qualitative material, see Fumasoli et al, 2014 andAntonowicz, 2015). The decision was grounded in methodological assumptions: a more quantitative approach suits the exploration of our research questions best, especially that the qualitative material is available for only five out of the eleven countries studied.…”

The European research elite: a cross-national study of highly productive academics in 11 countries

“…In four of them (Finland, Germany, Ireland, and Norway), being faculty at senior ranks increases the odds of becoming a top performer more than three times, in the Netherlands slightly less than three times, and in Poland almost twice (see Kwiek and Antonowicz 2015). This finding confirms the conclusions from previous productivity studies, although certainly academics in European higher education are more likely to be promoted to higher ranks if High Educ (2016) 71:379-397 391 they are highly productive.…”