Habilitation and Its (Dis)contents
Dr Habil (at the long last) Tomasz Kamusella
Lecturer in Modern History
I began my applications for the commencement of the
habilitacja (habilitation) procedure in early 2009, immediately
after my monograph, The Politics of Language and Nationalism
in Modern Central Europe (Palgrave 2009) had been published,
so that I could use it as the basis for this procedure. In
continental Europe habilitacja in Polish, Habilitation in German
or doktorskaia in Russian is another degree after PhD. It makes
you a full-fledged academic (samodzielny pracownik naukowy,
or ‘unsupervised scientific worker’) by giving you the right to
lecture at universities, automatically making your employment
permanent at your home university (earlier you can be only
employed on fixed-term contracts), and opening your way to a
professorship (in its different guises conferred, first, by your
university, and its two most sought-for and elevated distinctive
forms – professor extraordinarius and professor ordinarius – by
the Polish president). In Poland a person with habilitacja puts
dr hab in front of his or her name, standing for doktor
habilitowany, or ‘habilitated doctor.’ In the English versions of
their business cards Polish scholars usually render this
abbreviation as dr habil, deriving it from the Latin term doctor
habilitatus.
The main difficulty of the habilitacja procedure is finding a
faculty with the right to confer the degree in your preferred
specialization, and which would agree to open this procedure
for you. As you can sense this process is as much about
scholarship as about academic politics and personal likes and
dislikes. The narrow group of scholars with habilitacja, for all
practical reasons, functions as a corporation not interested in
broadening its membership too widely. Basically, by law, to
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exist and to have the right to confer BAs (licencjat), MAs
(magisterium), PHDs (doktorat) or habilitacja, universities and
other tertiary-education institutions in Poland need to employ
prescribed numbers of scholars with the dr habil degree. This
legal restriction puts people with this degree in high demand,
because there is constant dearth of them vis-à-vis the
ballooning tertiary-education sector in Poland, with almost 400
(mostly private) institutions at present. Hence, scholars with
the dr habil title can dictate their salaries, unlike PhDs, who
have problems finding employment and who are ‘rewarded’
with pay cheques lower than those of qualified workers.
When a faculty accepts your application for a habilitacja
procedure, it unfolds in a highly structured and painstakingly
slow manner. First, the candidate or his home university must
pay upfront for this procedure; currently PLN10,500 or £2,400,
which amounts to 3-5 monthly salaries of a scholar with a PhD.
The financial barrier being so high the vast majority of PhDs
applying for habilitacja carry out this procedure at their home
universities, which allows for non-monetary absorption of most
of the expenses involved. Second, the faculty appoints two
reviewers. Third, the Polish Ministry of Higher Education
appoints two more. The four reviewers are to read and assess
not only the candidate’s rozprawa habilitacyjna
(Habilitationschrift in German or doktorskaia in Russian for
‘habilitation dissertation’), but also all his or her scholarly
output after PhD. Such reviews are anything between 10 and
40 pages of text, and the reviewers have three months to
deliver them, but on average take at least six. Fourth, if at
least three reviews are positive the faculty votes on whether to
continue with the procedure. Should they agree to do so, they
settle on a date when an obrona habilitacji (habilitacja viva, or
literally ‘defence’) is to take place.
The viva requires the presence of the candidate and at least
three of the four reviewers. At the beginning, in front of the
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Faculty Council, the dean presents an abbreviated version of
the candidate’s CV, followed by the reviewers reading out the
shortened versions of their reviews. Next, the reviewers ask
the candidate questions related to his or her dissertation and
other scholarly writings. Then the floor is open to questions
from the public. After that the candidate is asked to leave the
room, and the Faculty Council vote on whether to continue with
the next stage of the viva. Should they agree to do so, they
have another vote in the course of which they choose one of
the four lectures proposed by the candidate beforehand. Then
the candidate is called back and asked to deliver the selected
lecture without any prop in the form of notes or the like (but
the entire text of the lecture then has to be sent to the dean’s
office after a successful viva). The lecture, taking into
consideration the overall length of the viva (3-4 hours), should
not last more than half an hour, and is followed by a Q&A
period. Afterward the candidate is asked to leave the room
again, and the final vote takes place on whether to confer the
title of doktor habilitowany on the candidate.
After the result of the vote is announced to the candidate,
assuming the whole affair finished on a positive note, in line
with the long-standing custom, s/he is expected to invite at
least the dean and the reviewers, but preferably the entire
faculty council, to dinner immediately after the viva. A week or
so later the candidate is issued with an official note, which
states that she has the right to use the title of dr habil. The
actual conferment of the degree takes place once or twice a
year, when the university rektor (or ‘rector,’ that is, Chancellor
in St Andrews terms) hands out PhD and dr habil diplomas
(invariably written in an exquisite hand) to their happy owners
at special graduation ceremonies. Meanwhile, the documents of
the successful viva are sent to the Ministerstwo Nauki i
Szkolnictwa Wyższego (Ministry of Science and Tertiary
Education), in the framework of which the independent body,
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the Central Committee on Scientific Degrees and Titles
(Centralna Komisja do Spraw Stopni i Tytułów ) checks up on
and reaffirms the conferment, and registers the degree in the
central data base, Polish Science (Nauka Polska).
In my case the entire habilitacja procedure took almost three
years, as I commenced it in early 2009 and my viva took place
on November 22, 2011. I was informed about the viva a week
before, which is quite short notice when you need to reach
Poland from Scotland, but it is rare for a scholar working at an
Anglo-Saxon-style university to be going through with a
habilitacja procedure in Poland. The dr habil degree is not
needed in Scotland, and during my viva I was actually asked
why I had applied for it. Well, I got my job at the University of
St Andrews only this September, and in 2009 I had no way of
knowing about this happy development.
Within the EU’s common scientific area, scholars from Britain or
Ireland, where habilitacja does not exist must be
accommodated somehow within continental academias, so that
continental universities do not fall foul of Common Market
principles. In Poland this is done in an ad hoc manner at
universities where such British and Irish scholars happen to be
employed, or invited to lecture or participate in other scholarly
activities. The universities, on the basis of such scholars’
records of publications and research, decide whether to treat
them as dr habils. The best of both worlds is enjoyed by
scholars in the Netherlands, as in line with the EU regulations,
the Dutch PhD is automatically treated as habilitacja in EU
member states where this degree is extant.
My academic employment not depending on the final outcome
of my habilitacja viva, I progressed to Warsaw quite calmly,
having booked my flights for Sunday, November 20, 2011. I
hoped for Monday free to visit bookstores and the Polish
National Library. No such luck. Plans may be made, but it does
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not mean that life will allow you to stick to them. I was to fly to
Warsaw by KLM via Amsterdam. Initially, the flight got delayed
due to the foggy conditions at Schiphol. When it opened for
boarding I was turned away, because I would not be able to
connect to the Warsaw flight in Amsterdam. I was rebooked for
a bmi flight to Heathrow. Unfortunately, this London airport
turned out to be as disoriented by fog as Schiphol. The flight
eventually took off from Edinburgh Airport four hours later than
schedule. I was sure that I would not catch my Lot (Polish
Airlines) flight to Warsaw. Surprisingly, I did, as the foggy
conditions delayed all the flights at Heathrow.
I left Dundee at 4am on Sunday and planned to arrive in
Warsaw at 4. This I did, but at 4am the next day, Monday. To
add insult to injury, my suitcase got lost en route. In Poland it
is just unthinkable to attend any official occasion, and
especially the one in the course of which the attention of those
attending would be focused on you, in informal dress. The
public can dress down a bit, while you are expected to dress up
even beyond the usual standard of formal attire. When I woke
up at noon on Monday, I started frantically phoning the lost
luggage department at Chopin Airport in Warsaw. With no good
news arriving, at 4pm I went to the nearby Promenada
shopping center, where in the Royal Collection shop I tried on
suits, shirts, shoes, ties, winter coats, scarfs and the like. I had
to look presentable for my viva the following day, on Tuesday.
As the shop’s name suggested I would have paid through the
nose, but after having selected a formal outfit, at half past five,
the people from the lost luggage department phoned me to let
me know that my lost suitcase had resurfaced. They promised
to deliver it to my hotel before 10pm. I gritted my teeth, but
was happy that I did not have to purchase the expensive
clothes.
And indeed, the suitcase did arrive, but at 11pm, so I spent the
hours until 1am ironing and sprucing up my wardrobe. Luckily,
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I could sleep in, as the viva was scheduled for 11am. The
logistic problems consumed whatever nervousness was left,
and I approached the viva eerily calm. It all went well, and I
am happy to inform you that the Faculty of Social Sciences and
Humanities at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and
Humanities (regarded as the best private university in Poland)
conferred me the dr habil degree in kulturoznawstwo (Cultural
Studies).
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