It took me years to realise that I wasn’t simply changing jobs, but repeatedly colliding with the same institution. Different names, buildings and logos, but a very simlar conversation.
Or rather, the absence of one.
The Academy always wins. Not necessarily the university, but the academy as a way of organising the world: committees, procedures, unofficial hierarchies, private networks, invisible rules. Measurements within a self-contained universe. Nobody quite says no. Nobody quite says yes. Decisions drift through corridors until they emerge bearing the authority of somebody else.
“The reviewer said.”
“Management decided.”
“The regulations require.”
“An expert concluded.”
Responsibility evaporates upwards.
I have worked with enough Polish institutions to begin recognising the pattern. The Institute of National Remembrance, public television, radio, news agencies, universities, publishing. Different missions, different politics, remarkably similar organisational instincts.
When I first met the dean of my faculty at Vizja University, it was to be dismissed. After weeks of begging to meet to discuss simple logstics and then lack of payments.
No conversation.
No feedback.
Then, suddenly, authority.
The person who might have welcomed me into the institution appeared only to remove me from it.
At the Institute of National Remembrance, nobody seemed entirely certain what anyone else was doing. Meetings generated paperwork. Paperwork generated more meetings. Mistakes were rarely acknowledged. Someone else had misunderstood. Another department had failed. A procedure had not been followed. Bureaucracy became less a way of organising work than a way of distributing blame.
Across all of them I sensed the same instinct: stay inside the network, protect the institution, avoid unnecessary risk.
Perhaps this is not uniquely Polish. Every country has bureaucracies, gatekeepers and professional tribes. Britain certainly has its own versions. But in Poland I repeatedly encountered an unusually quiet intelligentsia: people who rarely argued openly, rarely confronted directly, yet maintained intricate systems of inclusion and exclusion. The hierarchy was seldom announced. It was simply understood.
For a long time I thought the problem was me.
Now I think the mismatch runs deeper.
Then there was the television celebrity.
He wanted his book to have an authentic English voice. That was why he approached me in the first place. A native speaker, journalist, published author.
Months later, after receiving the first stage of the translation, the stage we had agreed would be followed by discussion, editing and refinement, the verdict arrived.
The English was, apparently, too Polish.
The irony almost writes itself.
A Polish author had sought an English voice and, when he encountered one, dismissed it for sounding insufficiently English on the basis of a draft that had never been intended as the finished work. The judgement came not directly, but through another authority: an external reviewer. The conversation ended before it had really begun.
I still admire Poland. I admire its writers, its history, its humour, its resilience, the stubborn independence of many of the people I’ve met outside institutions. My criticism is not of the country but of a professional culture that too often mistakes opacity for seriousness and hierarchy for authority.
Perhaps that is why, after all these years, I find myself looking elsewhere.
No money in the bank, three kids to feed and a professional life yet to fully waste may also provide clues.
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