Academic cleaning in People's Poland was not a one-time act of violence, but a process stretched over time. Passwords, language and performers changed, but the goal remained the same: control over who has the right to teach, interpret the planet and rise elites. The expression “so as not to be an academic teacher” came back like a chorus—from Stalinism, through March ’68, to late PRL, and a minute of transformation that, contrary to myths, did not bring to universities cleansing or thawing.
After the Stalinist purges of the 1940s and 1950s – symbolized by the removal of Władysław Tatarkiewicz – 1956 was an exception. October thaw meant partial rehabilitation of the injured scholars, return to the cathedral, restoration of simple pluralism. It was a minute erstwhile the power admitted, even indirectly, to abuse. This precedent has led academic consciousness to believe that injustice can be reversed.
March ’68 broke with this illusion. The removals were selective and cynical – they touched both the authentic critics of the strategy and the erstwhile co-creators of the apparatus of power. any of the expelled scholars left for the West, where their careers flourished. The PRL universities lost, but the strategy did not feel guilty. Moreover, there was no later act of collective rehabilitation – after March ’68 no 1 officially “twisted” the decision.
However, the most undervalued and at the same time the most lasting phase of cleansing was the Jaruzel era. After martial law was introduced in 1981, a wave of little spectacular but much more effective removals began. It was no longer about large ideological processes, but about administrative decisions: non-extended contracts, negative staff opinions, promotion blockades, forced "free leave". The university eliminated persons associated with “Solidarity”, independent humanities, lecturers with authority among students.
These cleanings were preventive. The authority, aware of the impending crisis of the system, wanted universities under full control. So people who could play the function of intellectual change leaders were removed. Importantly, many of them never returned to college, even after the formal abolition of repression. Unlike 1956, there was no minute of symbolic rehabilitation, no organization repentance.
However, the top paradox was 1989. The collapse of communism created the impression of a extremist break with the past, but in the academic sphere, there was no "rehydration". There was no mass return of the removed lecturers, no systematic review of the wrongs, no continuity of interrupted biography was restored. Those who were pushed out of universities in the 1980s were frequently already out of the strategy – they worked in the underground, in interior emigration or outside science.
The systemic transformation introduced fresh selection mechanisms, this time marketplace and environmental. The university would alternatively look to the future than account for the past. erstwhile personnel decisions were considered to be "irreversible facts", and the work was diluted in the anonymity of the committees, rectors and dean. As a result, communism collapsed, but its academic effects remained.
The past of academic cleansings in Poland thus shows that the top harm was not the repression itself, but the deficiency of moral continuity. Stalinist crimes had their – although late – correction in 1956. Late PRL and the Jaruzel era did not have any equivalent. The slogan “not to be an academic teacher” was yet fulfilled in silence and without witnesses.
A university that cannot reconstruct the memory of its own excluded people loses its right to talk about autonomy. due to the fact that autonomy without historical work becomes only a convenient story – the same as it justified the decisions made for "the good of the system" for decades.
