The habilitation degree in Poland ends not with a bang but with a whimper: in spite of grandiloquent announcements from Minister Czarnek about restoring its due prestige and role, the increase in the number of schools entitled to grant habilitation leads to a hyperinflation of this degree, and in the long run – to its demise. In our article, we are discussing briefly the pros and cons of habilitation system, the status quo after most recent reforms, the quantitative analysis of the numbers of schools receiving the habilitation granting rights, and the consequences of the change. We end with a short description of possible scenarios of the current crisis.

The aim of the paper is to show the scale of preparing habilitation reviews ending with untypical conclusions and the impact of such reviews on the outcome of habilitation proceedings in one discipline – sociology. The general analysis of the outcome of the review comes down to the final conclusion; the detailed analysis proposed by the author also takes into account the degree of strengthening or weakening of this conclusion. In particular, the weakening of a positive conclusion may indicate that the actual evaluation of the work is rather negative and differs from the nominal evaluation. The article begins with a theoretical introduction in which the author analyzes the legal aspects of reviewing the achieve­ments to the habilitation degree, the imperfections of this process indicated in the literature, and briefly refers to American and Polish research in the field of pragmatics of RPT reviews, which provide tools to interpret the mechanism of formulating unobvious conclusions. A study conducted on a sample of 130 habi­litation cases in sociology from 2012–2019 showed that the results of the pro-ceedings were rather consistent with the results of the reviews. Nevertheless, a set of “border proceedings” have been identified that have received reviews with a low degree of certainty (weakened) or some, but divergent, degree of certainty. In their case, the outcome of the proceedings was unpredictable, i.e. proceedings with the same review configuration ended in different ways.

According to a widespread view, reviews in science are an instrument for the selection of ideas and people. The article analyzes the gatekeeping role of habilitation proceedings in Polish sociology, taking into account three main areas: (1) the power held in the field of sociology by individual and institutional selectors, (2) statistics on the results of selection, and (3) the fate of academics rejected in the gatekeeping process. It has been found that (1) in Polish sociology there are leading institutions that play the largest role in awarding habilitation degrees, but unlike in other disciplines, there is no phenomenon of domination in the field of review by specific scholars. (2) In the proceedings from 2013–2019, 12.5% of the proceedings ended with a refusal to grant the degree. In the set, no proceedings with a controversial outcome were found (e.g., conferring a degree with a preponderance of negative reviews or vice versa). In the examination of the review results, no trend of systematic gender discrimination was found. (3) 32% of those who were denied a degree left the scientific community, while 63% are still working at the same university as before the denial.

The purpose of this paper is both to present issues related to the interpretation of currently in force provisions on awarding degrees of doctor, habilitated doctor and the title of professor in the light of the Higher Education Law, as well as to attempt to reflect on whether a specific model of scientific promotion (career path) can be found in the analysed regulations. The issues seem to be of key importance for the practice of applying the latter, especially if one assumes that the supreme purpose of a particular model of scientific career is to ensure the highest quality of scientific research.

Krzysztof Maurin was an extremely versatile intellectual and academic teacher. He worked in mathematics (monograph “Methods of Hilbert space”), philosophy (publication “Karl Jaspers – a philosopher of truthfulness”), theology (essay “The Son of Man as the foundation of great religions”) as well as in psychology and he taught in the Faculty of Physics of the Warsaw University: I was taught by Him during a second half of His life since the beginning of the 70s. Now we are seeing and presenting his various activities in the time analysed by him in senses of quantum and cosmic physics, Heidegger's philosophy, Schweitzer's theology and human and humanitarian psychology. Therefore we remind below his lectures on Medieval Universities, Humboldt's reform, the XIX century mathematics and indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Then, according to a chronological order, we are switching our attention to Krzysztof Maurin himself as a student of university underground courses during the time do Nazists occupation in Poland, then as a silent university employee resisting communist totalitarian ideology and after 1956, as a methodical professor of the University of Warsaw collaborating with Western Europe scientists such as LDrs GDrding, Werner Heisenberg, Rene Thom and Friedrich von Weizsacker as well as admiring especially intellectual achievements of Hermann Weyl and Martin Heidegger. To the end of biographical considerations we can observe successes and obstacles encountered by Krzysztof Maurin while He has tended to conciliate various or opposite ways of philosophical understanding or social behaving by his beloved thinkers.