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Description

State socialism tried to industrialize, urbanize, encourage the more frequent washing of hands, urge people to leave the church, emancipate women, and electrify cities—all within a single lifetime. Central to these initiatives was extending educational opportunities to the working class and creating a vision of an egalitarian socialist university that offered advancement for all. Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland traces the possibilities and limits of this goal by looking at a model socialist university established in 1945 in the working-class city of Łódź, Poland. Initially a flagship project of socialist modernization, the university tried to offer social advancement by privileging admission for peasant and working-class children, but these efforts were often fought by the elite who sought to preserve their privilege. By looking at first-generation students, intelligentsia faculty, and an industrial city, Limiting Privilege explores a complex story about utopian visions, failed aspirations, and reluctant academia.

ISBN

9781612498843

Publication Date

Winter 12-15-2023

Publisher

Purdue University Press

City

West Lafayette

Keywords

socialist university, state socialism, upward mobility, intelligentsia reproduction, hysteresis, postwar Poland, working-class education, higher education under state socialism, Polish People’s Republic, social imaginary, biographical interview, first-generation students, professors biography, socialist modernization, socialist privilege, communism, Łódź, social structure, reform, classicism, egalitarian socialism

Disciplines

European History | History

Comments

Open access publication of this title is supported by JSTOR's Path to Open.

Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland

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