ACADEMIC DEMOCRACY VERSUS OLIGARCHIC AND AUTHORITARIAN TENDENCIES IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

The paper contains a critical analysis o f various kinds o f anomy and oligarchic and authoritarian tendencies that have become visible within the Polish institutions of academic democracy. Oligarchy and authoritarianism in the world o f Polish sociology have their roots both in the formal socialist past and in the mechanical transferring principles of „competitive business enterprise” (Veblen) to academic and spiritual work. Anomic competition that presupposes and causes various kinds o f monopoly leads to the poverty and uniformity o f language and thought. Master - lackey relations displace such cooperation and mutual esteem of academic and nonacademic teachers, students and parents that serve the common good. The egalitarianism of average value and the lowest marginal value dominate over the egalitarianism of the highest marginal value. The place of censorship as a profession has been taken by censorship as an inner calling. The system of the academic results evaluation subordinates the quality o f scholarly and didactic work to purely quantitative indicators. The delusive and apparently objective statistics favour the subordination of quality to quantity. Anomic competition generates surrendering to a rule: Omnia pro tempore, nihil pro veritate - everything for circumstances, nothing for truth. Irreconcilable competitors fight against one another by means of grey and black marketing. The rules of anomic competition are directed not only against contemporary scholars, but also against the Founding Fathers of modern social sciences. Competition with the classics is co-conditioned by a search for absolute originality. The paper emphasizes that the present-day reforms of Polish education and science add new values to the Veblenian analysis concerning the transformation of universities into competitive business enterprises and into authoritarian and bureaucratic institutions