80 years of the Faculty of Humanities at Nicolaus Copernicus University.
A moment to celebrate – and a moment to reflect more broadly.

14/01/2026

During the 80th anniversary of the Faculty of Humanities at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, I spoke about more than the history of one academic unit. Anniversaries easily turn into narratives of continuity, achievement and institutional pride – and these are fully justified. Yet today, it is difficult to speak about the humanities solely in a celebratory register. The jubilee became, for me, a pretext for a wider reflection on the place of the humanities in a world undergoing systemic transformation.

We seem to be living through a moment of disciplinary inflection. This is not merely – or even primarily – about shifts in paradigms or the competition between research schools. The humanities have navigated such intellectual transformations many times before. What we are experiencing now is deeper: a long-term transformation of research policy that, in Poland at least, has been unfolding since the late 2000s. Importantly, this process has advanced in a remarkably linear fashion, largely independent of electoral cycles or changes in government.

Funding models, evaluation systems, the dominant vocabulary of “impact,” “innovation,” and “utility” – all of these gradually reposition the humanities, as we knew them, toward the margins of mainstream narratives about progress and competitiveness. This is not a uniquely Polish development. Its structural drivers are global.

And yet – it is important to say this clearly – the situation of the humanities in Poland is not as severe as what we currently observe in the United States or in parts of Western Europe. There, we see program closures, structural downsizing, and the dismantling of entire fields of study. By comparison, our institutional position remains relatively stable and secure, even if accompanied by a sense of symbolic displacement.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply defensive. We are neither exceptional nor isolated – and the core of this transformation is not local. The scale is global, and its consequences will be long-term.

The real question is different:
How do we preserve what is fundamental to the humanities – interpretive capacity, critical reflection, historical consciousness, normative thinking – while adapting to new institutional realities?
Is the answer full alignment? Selective transformation? Or, in some dimensions, conscious resistance?

What seems certain is that we urgently need new tools – intellectual, institutional, and linguistic. The humanities cannot rely on nostalgia for a previous status. They must articulate, with precision and confidence, their function within a global knowledge architecture that increasingly equates value with measurable metrics.

The 80th anniversary of our Faculty of Humanities is a moment of pride.
But it is also a moment of responsibility.

Because the future of the humanities will not be determined within a single faculty, university, or country. It is being negotiated within a global knowledge system – and it requires not only the defense of tradition, but a strategic redefinition of the role we wish to play within it.