Abstract
The paper provides a descriptive account of recent changes in Italian higher education policy, focusing in particular on the impact that recent reforms have had on the internal governance of the nation’s universities. The paper shows how the government’s policy of reform (which is currently moving away from the traditional “command and control” approach to a “steering from a distance” policy) risks being either ineffective or attaining its goals too slowly due to the persistence of deeply rooted, previous institutional governance practices. The greater autonomy currently enjoyed by universities is managed in a corporatistic-oligarchic decision-making style, which leads to sluggish distributive outputs and institutional adaptation to external changes. The paper provides empirical evidence of this institutional inconsistency. In an attempt to deal with this problem, there have been discussions and debate in recent years about re-designing the institutional arrangement of universities, even though it is unlikely that any coherent decisions will be taken on this matter, due to the intractability of the problem resulting from a series of political, cultural and social factors.
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Notes
In 1988 the new Ministry of Higher Education and Research was created from te sub-division of the old Ministry for Public Education. From 1996 to 1998, the two ministries were riunited only to be split again from 1998 to 2001. A new process of reunification was decided by the Berlusconi’s government (2001–2006), but the new Prodi government, elected in Spring 2006, has once again given an autonomous role to the Ministry of Universities.
It should be pointed out that, in Italy, students pay relatively more (as part of the public funding of universities) than their counterparts in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Until this decision was made, the State had the power to determine the composition of the institutional staff (establishing the ratio of professors to members of the lower academic ranks, as well as the composition of non-academic staff).
The National University Council is made up of representatives of academics, non-academic staff, rectors and students. However the majority of its members are academics elected at the national level by their peers. It exercises an important advisory role with regard to many academic matters, and in particular that of the approval of new degree courses.
Before this new regulation was introduced, universities could only create new study programs with the permission (and the subsequent financing) of the Ministry.
In Italy, since 1980, the content and confines of academic subjects have been established by law. At the moment there are about 380 “academic sectors” established by law. Each professor belongs to a single academic sector.
PhD level degrees saw the light of day in 1980, under a centralized ministerial system. Then in 1999, Italian universities were provided with a greater degree of independence in organizing PhD courses (within a framework of general rules). However, universities have done a fairly poor job of organizing their own PhD programmes. There has been a structural fragmentation of PhD courses: there are too many programmes (about 2,200 in all throughout Italy), generally centred around a very narrow range of academic subjects; there are few places, and very few scholarships, for each course; graduate mobility is extremely limited (meaning that the majority of PhD students do their research at the same university from which they graduated); finally, there are few courses with any real structured teaching. Generally speaking, the “independent” universities have failed to govern their own PhD courses. Strategic decisions have not been made: the institutional PhD system has simply emerged through an acceptance of the internal balance of powers among chair-holders and subject areas.
However, participation is also a problem for the democratic-corporatist approach; as past and present experience shows, the democratic mechanism is simply a way of selecting decision-makers rather than a means of guaranteeing collective, conscious, responsible participation in the most important institutional decisions.
The source of the figures on Italian academics in politics is the Archive on the Italian Political élite, Centre for the Study of Political Change, University of Siena.
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Capano, G. Looking for serendipity: the problematical reform of government within Italy’s Universities. High Educ 55, 481–504 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-007-9069-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-007-9069-1