The Politics of Academic Legitimacy: Governance and EpistemicJustice in Poland and Romania

This article examines how higher education governance in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe functions as an epistemic regime, shaping which forms of knowledge are legitimized and which are marginalized.Focusing on Poland and Romania, it traces continuities from socialist-era ideological control to post-1989 reforms framed around modernization, internationalization, and competitiveness.While such reforms dismantled overt political censorship, they introduced new exclusions through managerialism, bibliometric evaluation, and the dominance of English in scholarly publishing.Historical case studies, including the suppression of intellectual traditions under socialism and the marginalization of national-language scholarship in the contemporary period, illustrate how governance mechanisms act as 'epistemic filters.' Drawing on decolonial and critical epistemology frameworks, the analysis foregrounds the persistence of disregarded epistemologies, locally rooted, interdisciplinary, and community-oriented forms of knowledge excluded from institutional recognition.The paper argues that addressing epistemic injustice in CEE universities requires rethinking evaluative infrastructures, fostering multilingual and regionally relevant scholarship, and recovering marginalized intellectual traditions.By linking governance structures to the politics of knowledge, the study contributes to debates on epistemic justice in comparative education and calls for governance models that embrace plurality, linguistic diversity, and the democratization of academic legitimacy.