The bill also prohibits describing Nazi death camps in Poland as Polish. It sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term as punishment.

The proposal caused a weekend rift with Israel, which accuses Poland of attempting to change history.

The bill must be signed off by the president before entering into law.

It passed in the upper house of the Polish parliament with 57 votes to 23, with two abstaining, according to AFP news agency.

On Sunday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out against the draft, calling for it to be dropped.

“I strongly oppose it. One cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied,” he said in a statement.

Polish President Andrzej Duda responded in a television interview, saying they could not back down and asserted that his country had the right “to defend historical truth”.

On Wednesday, a US State Department spokeswoman also asked the Polish government to rethink the bill, saying the US was concerned the legislation could undermine free speech in the country and cause further diplomatic division.

Poland was attacked and occupied by Nazi Germany during World War Two. Millions of its citizens were killed, including three million Polish Jews in the Holocaust.

The country has long objected to the use of phrases like “Polish death camps”, which suggest the Polish state in some way shared responsibility for camps such as Auschwitz. The camps were built and operated by the Nazis after they invaded the country in 1939.

The Polish government said the bill was not intended to limit freedom to research or discuss the Holocaust, but protect the country’s name abroad.

Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki, who authored the bill, said the Israeli reaction was “proof how necessary this bill is”.

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Source: BBC

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That could change, however. Under plans by science and higher education minister Jaroslaw Gowin, Poland’s top universities could shift from teaching to instead foster innovations that will power future businesses.

“Under the communist regime [until 1989] access to university-level studies was limited. In my generation just 7 per cent of people graduated,” says Mr Gowin, also deputy prime minister.

“Then, when communism collapsed, young people started studying on a massive scale.

“That brought about fantastic effects. But it also had some negative implications . . . Polish universities over the past few decades have focused heavily on education, and overlooked the importance of research,” Mr Gowin tells the FT.

“We need to be able to reverse that phenomenon now, by establishing more elite universities that would . . . educate fewer students, and focus primarily on research that can later be applied in the economy.”

According to data from Eurostat, Poland produced 598,000 graduates in 2013, the third-highest number in Europe after Britain and France.

Training them is not cheap. Poland spent 1.2 per cent of GDP on tertiary education in 2013, according to OECD data, the same as France and just below Germany.

That is a source of talent and part of what attracts investors.

But politicians fret that too many educated Poles work in process-oriented jobs in factories or in service centres for global companies seeking lower costs, or that they leave Poland.

In the wider economy, the equivalent of just 0.9 per cent of GDP is spent on research and development, under half the EU average and below Poland’s goal of 1.7 per cent by 2020.

Mr Gowin hopes his plan will change that, but says: “I know I face a big battle with academics [that] will start as soon as I announce the competition to select the few elite universities.”

Proponents of Mr Gowin’s proposed reforms point to Britain, France and Germany and the support they give to top institutions — such as Oxford, Cambridge, Paris-Sorbonne and Berlin’s Humboldt university — that has helped them become research leaders and business incubators.

“If we fail to establish elite universities, thousands of students, the very best and most brilliant ones, will leave to study in the UK, the US or elsewhere in Europe,” says Mr Gowin.

There are already hopeful signs for Poland. In August, it was listed alongside Australia, China and Turkey in a study by consulting firm Firetail as a country where universities could challenge the dominance of elite institutions in places such as the US and UK over the next two decades.

Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Warsaw were named in the 2016 edition of the global Nature Index, which ranks universities that have increased their level of high-quality research over the past three years.

In 2014 Warsaw university also announced it would start a co-operation initiative with the University of Cambridge in the UK to jointly set up a centre of excellence for research.

“It is a task ahead of each and every state to reinforce and invigorate academic and educational elites. And that is what our government believes in,” Mr Gowin says.

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Source: Financial Times

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