When Donald Tusk was running for prime minister of Poland in 2023, his 100 campaign promises included a measure that, in other countries, might have been expected to leave voters cold.

“We will improve the mechanisms for evaluating science,” it read.

But the pledge’s inclusion, alongside promises to boost abortion rights and the rule of law, “shows how politically salient such a seemingly technical matter had become”, according to Ireneusz Sadowski, a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Political Studies in Warsaw.

Poland’s current research evaluation system awards researchers points for their publications based on the perceived prestige of the journal in which they are published. But the list of legitimate journals and their corresponding points is determined by a ministry-appointed committee – and it prompted outcry in 2023, when an update under the far-right Law and Justice Party’s science and education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, saw publications in some small theological journals granted the maximum 200 points.

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“We had a situation where if you published in Nature, Science or a small, local journal, you’d get the same amount of recognition,” said Emanuel Kulczycki, associate professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań and head of its Scholarly Communication Research Group. “Even researchers in economics started to publish in small journals published by local churches.”

But why?

“It was a political game against [the perceived] ‘woke’ community of researchers, driven by a far-right Catholic movement,” Kulczycki said, referring to the Law and Justice Party’s . He noted that many of the highly-ranked outlets “were not even scientific journals”, and such was the outcry from the research community that the controversy transcended academic circles, reaching the national media and, ultimately, the desk of Tusk, the leader of the centre-right Civic Platform.

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After Tusk was elected prime minister in 2023, ending eight years of Law and Justice rule, the journal list was modified as promised, with publications such as Pedagogika Katolicka (Catholic Pedagogy) dropping from 200 to 70 points. But research evaluation remains a subject of debate in Poland’s academic community, with some calling for more sweeping reforms than those the government has suggested and expressing disappointment at Law and Justice’s enduring legacy nearly two years on from the October 2023 election.

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Poland’s current research assessment system was established under Czarnek’s predecessor, Jarosław Gowin, via a 2018 bill known as the “Constitution for Science”. Grant capture is employed as a metric alongside publication points, while peer review is used to determine impact.

The system was ripe for reform. Previously, assessment could be "gamed" by publishing high volumes of poor-quality publications, ,�����Ի� it did not appear to be driving quality in Polish research. Between 2015 and 2024, researchers based in Poland won only 30 starting grants from the European Research Council, often described as the Champions League of research. That amounts to just 0.7 per cent of the total awarded to early-career researchers. And though that kind of success rate is standard among former communist countries, the fact that 75 researchers of Polish nationality won starting grants (1.8 per cent of the total – more than double the number within Poland) suggests that many young Polish researchers are only competitive if they work outside Poland.

Nor has Poland’s success rate improved significantly over the nine years examined. And a similar picture is revealed by examining Poland’s success in winning ERC advanced grants, aimed at the most senior researchers. Poland won only 0.4 per cent of these between 2015 and 2024, compared with the UK’s 20.3 per cent and Germany’s 17.5 per cent.

The central premise of Gowin’s reforms, Sadowski said, was not a bad one: to link both universities’ public funding and their degree-awarding powers to their research excellence. When the bill was implemented, however, “the meaning of research excellence and the modes of financing research became subject to redefinition through executive acts”.

Under Czarnek, key research funders, including the National Science Centre (NCN) and the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), faced increasing political scrutiny, said Jarosław Płuciennik, professor of the humanities at the University of Lodz. “Czarnek openly criticised NCN-funded projects on topics he deemed ideologically unwelcome”, such as gender and sexuality research, “and proposed reforms that would privilege ‘patriotic’ themes, Polish-language review, or Polish-only reviewers”.

Similarly, the Law and Justice-affiliated president Andrzej Duda used what is usually considered merely ceremonial presidential power over academic appointments to repeatedly block the antisemitism researcher Michał Bilewicz’s promotion to full professor at the University of Warsaw, publicly branding him an “anti-Polish scholar”.

Under Law and Justice (PiS), higher education funding was “tightly controlled” by the science and education ministry, Płuciennik said: “Wielding substantial financial leverage, it could exert political influence over universities by rewarding loyalty or punishing dissent.”

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Then there was the establishment of the Copernican Academy in 2022, which, according to Barbara Piotrowska, lecturer in public policy at King’s College London, “was arguably just duplicating the Polish Academy of Sciences’ competencies, with more political control over who was appointed and with relatively better funding”.

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Given that the outrage such moves caused in academic circles found Tusk’s ear, “many scholars expected sharp change in the science policy” when he came to power, Sadowski said. Instead, “Polish academia is currently experiencing a period of high uncertainty.”

For instance, the Tusk coalition has made efforts to shut the body down, but these were blocked by Duda in his final month in office. His successor, the PiS-backed Karol Nawrocki, is likely to follow his lead.

More generally, with the next round of research assessment scheduled for this year, the new government has so far planned only “minor tweaks” to the system established in 2018, said Marta Wróblewska, assistant professor at SWPS University’s Institute of Humanities, a private university with various sites across Poland. Broader reforms are expected from 2026, but that is only a year before the next parliamentary elections are due, and the government has yet to reveal details of its proposals.

Perhaps that is in part because there is little consensus even among academics about what those proposals should be. To Wróblewska, the sector is stuck in a kind of “double bind”: “On one hand, there is a desire for a modernisation of evaluation and research processes, and that includes embracing peer review,” rather than relying on metrics, she said. But memories of the rampant nepotism that afflicted Polish academics in the communist era means that “many people have a distrust towards processes that involve evaluation by colleagues because there is an assumption that there will be favouritism”.

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Ministers also appear to be ambivalent, Wróblewska added: “The ministry wants to modernise our approach to evaluation and include elements of what is referred to as responsible research evaluation,” Wróblewska said, which favours peer review over metrics. “But they still want to be able to present indicators and hard data underpinning their decisions on funding and academic privileges.”

Kulczycki agrees that political vision is lacking: “The ministry is trying to improve things,” he said. “But if everything is rotten and broken, you cannot just paint it on the surface.”

In his view, Poland needs another revolution in evaluation, creating a system that rests on two “pillars”. The first is autonomy: after Czarnek’s manipulation of the journal list, “the ministry lost legitimacy to shape the system,” Kulczycki said. “Some other institution, independent from the ministry, should shape the evaluation criteria.”

Second, the research evaluation system should have a “very clear aim”, he believes. “Over the past two decades, the only aim for the government has been to justify the distribution of funding.” But it could and should be harnessed to shape behaviour, he believes; potential goals include increased international publications and stronger research collaboration with neighbouring countries.

“We can adjust the mechanism and shape incentives to demonstrate what the government perceives as good science. If you don’t have any aim, you just have evaluation for evaluation’s sake,” he said.

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But, according to Sadowski, there is as much pragmatism as indecision in the halfway house the Tusk government has chosen regarding its overhaul of the Gowin-era reforms – whereby “it does not cure the main ailments, but it prevents further inflammation”.

“The problem of relatively low funding, combined with the high expectations set by the original reform, has created a potentially explosive mix,” he explained. “For now, the status quo appears to be ‘we don’t push you on performance; you don’t push us on radically higher funding’. But it is difficult to see this as a sustainable solution.”

Insufficient funding has been a longstanding issue in the sector, Sadowski said, and it is a big part of the reason for the country’s underperformance in research. “In recent years, regardless of which party was in power, Poland has hardly moved toward the often-cited goal of spending 3 per cent of GDP on research and development.” In 2023, , R&D expenditure stood at 1.56 per cent of GDP, compared with the EU average of 2.22 per cent – though that was , making it one of the fastest-growing rates in the bloc.

“Nominally, each government has expanded the funding pools of scientific institutions and flagship grant agencies,” he added. “Yet taking inflation into account, the system remains largely underfunded, with many institutions experiencing substantial real-term budget cuts.”

University staff have seen at least one victory under Tusk’s government: in 2024, academic salaries , while professional and support staff received raises of 20 per cent. This move was “long overdue and welcomed by the academic community”, Płuciennik said, “but it will need regular adjustment to remain meaningful”.

And with Poland pledging to to an EU high of 4.7 per cent of GDP even before the recent incursions of into its airspace, the likelihood of such adjustments is open to question.

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The current sense of uncertainty is only heightened by the countdown to the next parliamentary elections. After Nawrocki’s albeit narrow victory in June’s presidential run-off, a return to power for PiS in 2027 seems a distinct possibility – and some fear that, inspired by the Trump administration’s assault on US higher education, a re-elected PiS could be “much bolder” in its dealing with universities, according to Piotrowska. “They are very much enamoured with the American right, and the American right is now showing the whole world what it is possible to do within a nominally democratic system,” she said.

Whatever reform the Tusk government ultimately settles on, it is clear that they risk being short-lived, if they are enacted at all. Indeed, the threat of a PiS resurgence might already be influencing Polish academia, Piotrowska added. That is because academics work to “a much longer timescale” than Poland’s four-year parliamentary cycle given “how long it takes to publish something or to build a career”. And researchers in fields to which PiS is hostile might feel particular pressure to secure funding while they still can.

“If you’re working on gender studies, for instance, you might want to capture grants very, very quickly, because you don’t know if you’re going to be able to hold on to them,” Piotrowska said. “If I were an academic working in something like gender studies, I’d probably want to either frame my work as something else or try and look for work abroad, just in case.

“You basically have two years until the next election. You don’t know what’s happening afterwards.”

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