Paper short abstract:

The proposed intervention is a short personal account of being caught in the middle of neoliberal transition that takes place in the higher education in Poland and of its incoherence with anthropological foundations.

Paper long abstract:

The ongoing neoliberalisation of higher education poses some serious questions concerning the politically imposed demands on public universities. The proposed intervention is therefore a short personal account of being caught in the middle of neoliberal transition that takes place in the higher education in Poland. Drawing on my own educational experience as an undergraduate and graduate student (before neoliberal reforms), and then, a doctoral candidate and postdoctoral researcher, I will attempt to present the changes that gradually affected my academic career and anthropology itself. The statement therefore concerns such issues as: McDonaldization of social sciences and humanities; research funding schemes and their incoherence with the foundations of anthropological fieldwork; the concerns of quantity over quality in the context of imposed parametric system; and, last but not least, the problem with officially expected close dependency and collaboration between academic research and the free market.