Major obstacles in implementation of the Chapter and Code in Poland: In our opinion Polish universities offer inadequate opportunities for professional development, especially for junior faculty (and PhD students), and suffer from bad management. Not much has changed in this respect since the communist times, with universities having been left practically unchanged with regard to their structure and
ways of functioning and academic career opportunities limited by lack of impartial recruitment, evaluation, and funding standards at the institutional level. An opportunity for change appeared when Polish Parliament began work on a new Higher Education Bill, drafted by rectors of Polish universities. We appealed to Members of
Parliament and academic officials to include at least the most essential principles of C&C in the new legislature. Unfortunately, our appeals were largely ignored: a representative of the ministry of research informed us that the C&C is only a recommendation, hence
Poland is not legally obliged to implement it or respect its
provisions. The same opinion was expressed during parliamentary debates. The new law, adopted on 27 July 2005, dropped even the requirement that new university teachers be selected in transparent and competitive recruitment procedures (the requirement which has
already been present in the previous Higher Education Act of 12 September 1990). This is particularly disappointing since the major authors of the bill were current and former members of the Polish Rectors Conference. To the best of our knowledge, the Conference has never seriously considered the option of implementing the C&C. Therefore, we consider representatives of the 'old guard' whose academic careers advanced mostly in communist Poland, to be the most significant obstacle in implementing the Charter and Code in Poland (see also: C. Wójcik 2004 Eastern Europe: progress stifled by the old guard NATURE 427: 196.)