‘The Pact for Academia’ is a set of proposals for policy makers, which aims at improving the environment for academic research in Poland and the situation of Polish universities. It addresses the shortcomings of the current system in regards to both long-term problems and issues that arose from recent uncoordinated reforms of the academic environment. ‘The Pact for Academia’ is a grassroots initiative that resulted from debates between scholars representing different academic disciplines and academic institutions, as well as non-scholars interested in the development of the research environment and higher education in Poland. The Pact has a structure that is modular to some extent, allowing for independent consideration of a number of its proposals.
10 key demands:
- Improvement of the quality of research and higher education in Poland.
- Enhancement of the position of universities, including local ones, as centres of social, economical and technological development.
- Putting an end to the pauperisation and precarisation of academic staff.
- Ensuring that academic career paths are more diverse and dependent solely on professional achievements.
- Building stronger links between all stages of the education system in Poland (from kindergarten to university) and making the concept of continuous education a reality. Improvement of teacher training and the engagement of scholars in advancing the education system also on primary and secondary levels.
- Creating a friendly environment for science advocacy and the popularisation of discoveries resulting from public-funded research.
- Ensuring that all ethical standards of academic research are met.
- Increasing government funding of research to at least 1% of the GDP (excluding EU funding) by 2020 and to 2% by 2030. Ensuring that funding of higher education institutions is sufficient to cover their real cost of operations.
- Creation of an efficient mechanism for the co-operation of scholars with the business sphere and simplified discovery-to-product procedures.
- New and coherent policy for public higher education founded on clear and objective criteria based on the quality of research and teaching.
