Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland (Central European Studies) - Hardcover

Zysiak, Agata

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1612498817 ISBN 13: 9781612498812

Publisher: Purdue University Press, 2023

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Agata Zysiak, PhD, is a historical sociologist at Vienna University in Austria and the University of Łódź in Poland. She is the author of the award-winning book, Punkty za pochodzenie (Points for Social Origin); coauthor of the main publication about Łódź available in English, From Cotton and Smoke; and the author of Wielki przemysł, wielka cisza (Great Industry, Great Silence), which covers Lodz industry and its collapse.

Edition details

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1612498817
• ISBN 13: 9781612498812
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 276