Academic Migration to Poland: Policies and Paradoxes

The skill-attracting policies encouraging the internationalisation of higher education are compatible with a modernisation discourse, at the heart of which lies a belief that international researchers are highly embedded super-achievers allured by targeted policies. By focusing on the life stories of foreign-born scholars working in Poland (100 in-depth interviews), and Polish department heads (20 interviews) this article revealed three paradoxes that should never have come to be according to the Western modernisation paradigm. The first paradox is related to the expectation that policies targeted at incoming scholars should be the first and foremost enticement for international scholars. The second paradox stems from the fact that some internationally mobile academics representing the humanities and social sciences—in their biographical narratives—highly criticise current academic policies focused on internationalisation. The third paradox is related to the fact that, counterintuitively, less embedded academic migrants perform better. This is an outcome of the life strategy of top-performing scholars, who decide to work in Poland only upon receiving a prestigious and temporary, often EU-funded, scholarship (e.g., Marie Curie). Building on the empirical material from Poland, this article introduces a new notion—the ‘internationalisation against the grain’ to embrace the paradoxes of internationalisation from many peripheral countries.