Since the launch of the Lisbon Agenda, European higher education systems have gravitated towards a common policy blueprint for governance that concentrates power in the hands of executive authorities and increases accountability to external stakeholders. The Polish system remains an outlier, providing an informative case study of a clash between European pressures and local path dependencies. The objective of this study was to investigate the forces that lodge the Polish system of higher education between the market and academic oligarchy, utilizing the lens of Burton Clark's (1986. The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-national Perspective. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) typology of governance. The author sought to uncover and compare the conceptualizations of governance held by two most powerful groups of higher education stakeholders. Findings indicate a stalemate of values between accountability to public interest and the independence of the academic order from short-term political interests. Conclusions from this study can inform reform efforts in contexts where externally legitimated blueprints for reform in higher education converge with social realities belying the blueprints' inherent assumptions.