In mid-July, the Government Legislation Center published a draft amendment to the Act on the Polish Academy of Sciences, presented by the Minister of Science and Higher Education. According to members of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), the proposal contains fundamental flaws that would have highly negative consequences for the operation of the academy. The General Assembly of the Polish Academy of Sciences – the academy’s highest body – stated that the proposal depreciates the academy’s institutional position by transferring oversight from the Prime Minister to the Minister of Science. This also gives the minister the rights to allocate funds between different institutes, endangering their independence. Representatives of the Polish Academy of Sciences are calling for further work on the legislation, based on a draft prepared within the academy.
“We have serious objections to the Act on the Polish Academy of Sciences, prepared by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Let me start with what has particularly struck us, the transfer of supervision over the Polish Academy of Sciences from the Chancellery of the Prime Minister to the minister of science,” says Prof. Marek Konarzewski, President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. “The academies of sciences in all countries, such as the United States, Great Britain, France, are specifically distinguished in the entire government structure in such a way as to be a direct expert background for the highest state authorities, and that role has also been performed until now by the Polish Academy of Sciences. This Act pushes us among other entities that are subordinate to the minister, such as universities. This will mean that our advisory role will also be limited, to the detriment of both the academy and, above all, the country, because our voice will be much less audible than before.”
The Minister wants to independently dismiss the Chancellor of the PAN, allocate funding to institutes, have his own representatives on their scientific boards and limit the competences of the president. Directors of PAN institutes, along with members of PAN, should elect the authorities of the academy (the president and vice-presidents) in a situation where other provisions of the project exclude effective influence of the academy on the institutes. This creates an internal imbalance in favor of the directors of the PAN institutes, which – in the opinion of Academy representatives – will lead to antagonizing the corporation with the institutes.
“This Act reduces the prestige of the Polish Academy of Sciences, but it also has much deeper consequences. I will point out one of them – namely, the division of grants, i.e., the financing of institutes, will now be performed in the ministry, from beginning to end. I’ll remind you that a year ago, in May, the then Minister of Science and Education, because he didn’t like the statement of Prof. Barbara Engelking, suspended the financing of one of the institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology,” Prof. Marek Konarzewski indicates. “Fortunately, this suspension was not successful because there was no appropriate provision in the Act that could sanction it. Now, under this Act, this will be possible and one can imagine that in the future a minister will appear who will want to use this tool.”
The Academy consists of a corporation of scientists and scientific institutes (68), and their organizational and administrative background is provided by the Chancellery of the PAN. Members of the PAN, who are elected by the General Assembly of the PAN from among scientists with a special scientific achievement and authority and an impeccable opinion, are associated in a corporation of scientists. The minister proposes that non-members choose members of the academy. This would be a world-class event, as no other academy of sciences uses a similar solution.
“This Act makes it so that supervision over the academy’s large wealth, and it must be said that we have multi-billion assets at our disposal, is transferred directly to the minister. The chancellor – the person who has direct financial supervision – will be directly subordinate to the minister. This is roughly as if in a university the chancellor was subordinated to the minister and acted independently of the rector of this university. Such a system does not exist in any Polish university and it could not function because it would immediately lead to very large managerial disturbances,” assesses the president of the PAN.
The Act is also to abolish the Scientific Committees of the PAN that were only recently established. In their place, the minister will appoint new ones, with representatives delegated by various bodies, such as the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland (KRASP). Thus, the Committees will cease to be a democratic representation of scientific environments, elected in general elections by independent scientists.
“The scientific committees, which are co-created by the Polish Academy of Sciences, have almost 3,000 members. More than 10,000 independent scientific employees in Poland took part in the elections to these committees. And these committees will be liquidated by the force of the Act, new elections to these committees will be held, while these elections were concluded last year,” recalls Prof. Marek Konarzewski. “This will introduce an unprecedented chaos not only in the Polish Academy of Sciences, but in the whole system of Polish science, created from the bottom up through the activity of specific scientists who want to work in the committees and be useful not only when it comes to the scientific community, but also more broadly, because these are expert opinions, voices that are heard both in public opinion and should be heard by decision-makers.”
Membership in the PAN – as is the case with all national academies of sciences in Europe – is lifelong. Representatives of the academy are alarmed that the ministerial project wants to take away voting rights from members over 75 years of age, although – as they emphasize – going into retirement should be a right, not an obligation.
Moreover, the President of the PAN stresses that the proposed supervision over the institutes is flawed. On one hand, annual assessments of institutes are introduced, which is excessively frequent and disproportionate to the frequency of assessments of university units. On the other hand, there are no mechanisms for effective substantive control, e.g. conducted by the PAN faculties. The project also introduces an assessment of the activities of the faculties, despite the fact that they do not have their own funds, but only bring together members from specific fields. An unjustified assessment of the PAN committees is also introduced.
The ministry’s project differs drastically from the project that the scientific community submitted to the minister of science last year. In June this year, the General Assembly adopted a position according to which the starting point for further work on the Act should be the draft Act prepared in the Polish Academy of Sciences.
“Perhaps at this moment maybe 5% of these provisions are repeated, and the rest raise our doubts. We are not insisting that all the provisions of our proposal should be included in the final draft, but they should be a starting point. This is a message that is still valid, and as I think, it will be renewed in early September when the Polish Academy of Sciences will gather at a special assembly dedicated to the Act. We will appeal to decision-makers, especially to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, to return to this discussion, taking our draft Act as a starting point,” concludes the President of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
