APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
a strengthened system of mandatory classes in Marxist philosophy at the higher schools; a compulsory manual labor program for students in higher education. In addition, influential liberal professors, many of them Jews, were purged immediately following the government's suppression of the student demonstrations by the end of March 1968. Together with the general antiliberal and anti-intellectual atmosphere which pervaded the 1968 political crisis, these measures had a cumulative deleterious effect on university students and faculty alike.
The point system, which weights university entrance examinations in favor of students of peasant and worker origin, was a direct outgrowth of party concern over the persistently disproportionate number of higher school students who were of a white-collar background. The point system as a concept in Poland was not new; what was new in 1968 was the regime's apparent determination to implement it in practice, as well as the heavy weighting given to the worker and peasant candidates. The system had never been as widespread in Poland as in the U.S.S.R. and some other Communist countries even during the Stalinist period, and after 1956 it virtually disappeared. In 1965 it was reintroduced, largely unheralded, but it was soon generally circumvented by both the regime and the students in cooperation with willing faculty. One reason for the failure of the regime prior to 1968 to implement a system which was on the books appeared to be its own realization that in many ways it ran counter to government efforts to increase markedly the number of technically and professionally qualified personnel. The same overriding factors appeared to vitiate the system soon after 1968, and the stress now placed by the Gierek regime on skill whatever its origins suggests that these provisions have again become largely dominant. As early as 1969 there were signs of evasion of the point system, particularly since widespread opposition to it included party intellectuals who felt that their own children were unjustly deterred from pursuing higher education while untalented individuals were favored. In fact, data published for the first time in 1971 revealed that little change in the social background of students in higher education had occurred between 1965/66 and 1970/71, as shown by the percentages in the following tabulation:
| Worker | Peasant | White-Collar | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1965/66 | 27.2 | 17.0 | 50.4 |
| 1970/71 | 29.9 | 15.5 | 50.3 |
Organizationally, the October 1968 legislation on higher education was designed to implement the party's resolve to establish control over the universities, and particularly to curb the power of the semi-independent faculties to shape the character of a school through their control of the curriculum, teacher selection and development, and general supervision and discipline of the student body. The operative provision of the law was, therefore, the reversal of the power positions of the rector on the one hand and that of the faculty senate and those academicians holding the traditional "chairs" or katedry on the other. The rector and deans are now appointed by the government rather than, as previously, elected from the senate and faculty councils. In several academic areas, such as history and philology at Warsaw University, the traditional "chairs" have been abolished along with their prerogatives—such as independent hiring of assistants, direction of their graduate study, and budget control—and incorporated as sections into newly created institutes under a party-approved director. Although the stated reason for these structural changes was the fragmentation and overlapping of research conducted by self-serving professors (in some cases true), the main aim clearly was political control. Between 1967 and 1970 the number of kadetry in all institutions of higher education declined from 2,064 to 232, while the number of institutes rose from 62 to 508. This aspect of the 1968 reforms, although initially resisted and still unpopular among those who stood to lose their authority, seems to have the support of younger assistants and instructors and is one part of the 1968 reforms that apparently has been successful on its own terms.
The same cannot be said of ideological education and of the program of student labor. The regime decision in 1968 to revitalize ideological indoctrination in the schools included the reintroduction of mandatory Marxist-Leninist philosophy studies in the higher schools, consisting of a 4-hour, once-a-week lecture and seminar. This concept also is not entirely new; in late 1964 the regime called for the resumption at the university level of Marxist-Leninist courses which had been discontinued in 1956. The course then introduced, entitled "Rudiments of Political Science," was soon virtually nullified by the massive apathy of the students and the lack of qualified teachers. At its fifth congress in November 1968, the party called for the introduction of compulsory, paid "physical labor" for higher school students during their first three summer vacations. Such student labor, to be accomplished at farms or in the factories, had not existed in Poland since shortly before World War II when central categories of students were obliged to work in the summer preceding their entry into a
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
