School on a Hill. The Kozminski Story

Abstract

Professor Andrzej K. Koźmiński, a well-known economist and scholar of organization and management, has gone down in recent Polish history as the founder of Kozminski University, an elite private facility which, according to "The Financial Times", is the best business school in Central Europe. His biography is full of successes and examples of the obstacles he had to overcome to fulfil his dream of having his own academic school and a European-class business university. It is also a unique portrait of a Warsaw professor’s family, the pre-war intelligentsia who experienced the bloody turns of 20th-century history. The Koźmiński family’s strong roots in European culture and the Enlightenment’s cult of science proved to be a way to survive the Bolshevik Revolution, both world wars, the deportation of the family to Auschwitz after the Warsaw Uprising, and the relentless devastation of the academic community during the communist era.