Looking for serendipity: the problematical reform of government within Italy’s Universities

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.

Higher education governance in France, Germany, and Italy: Change and variation in the impact of transnational soft governance

“…The professoriate strategically mobilized to capture the administrative councils to the extent that they could hardly be distinguished from academic senates in terms of composition and function. Demands for entrepreneurial governance structures hence resulted in the duplication of already existing academic-dominated institutions (Capano, 2008;Moscati, 2012;Interview Italian university researcher 2015) to the detriment of external stakeholders (Donina, Meoli, & Paleari, 2015). Thus, by 2010, Italy had actually to some extent fallen back into academic oligarchy, as attempts at isomorphic alignment with managerialist structures were either strategically exploited to reinforce historical institutions or simply withered away in the entrenched collegial institutions.…”

“…Legislation aligns Italy with north-western European systems, authorizing universities to undertake their own strategic investments, but in many instances, they do not make use of this autonomy. They rather tend to overinvest in academic personnel, while undertaking relatively few non-personnel investments such as technology centers, external cooperation, and entrepreneurial activities (Capano, 2008;see below). In other words, international trends were to some extent exploited to strengthen the clout of powerful academics (Table 3, Illustration 2).…”

“…This created incentives for universities to initiate as many concorsi as possible despite lacking state funds to accommodate their own personnel. Thanks to previously introduced lump-sum budgets, universities in turn used funds specified for so-called 'entrepreneurial activities' to appoint their own candidates to professorships (Interview IT-2; Capano, 2008). The state cracked down on this development with the recentralization of appointments in the 2000s.…”

“…However, amid budget cuts, many aspiring researchers lost their status as university researchers (ricercatori) in 2006. To prevent them from migrating abroad, many universities began to appoint the ricercatori to professorships with their investment funds (Capano, 2008), leading to a 50% increase in the number of full professors since 1998 (CNVSU, 2009;Esposti & Geraci, 2010, 118) and reinforcing the widespread practice of in-house appointments (CNVSU, 2009). However, the Gelmini law now externalizes professorial appointments to panels of state-appointed academics from other universities, before individual universities may then choose among candidates deemed eligible.…”

Drivers of Inequalities in Higher Education and the Unexpected Consequences of Equality Policies

“…Specific constraints to the autonomy of the universities are still retained: universities are not differentiated in their formal mission, they cannot modify their tuition fee threshold, their budget for the cost of personnel is defined by the State as well as the status of their professors and the level of their salaries; the core funding is largely allocated on the basis of historical patterns and not on the basis of evaluation results (Reale and Potì, 2009). This orientation has been largely supported by the academics, who feared that pursuing differentiation would increase competition among HEIs and weaken the homogeneity of the system, reducing academic freedom (identified as a source of quality) and reinforcing the steering capabilities of the institutional level (Capano, 2008). Bonaccorsi and Daraio (2008) used positioning indicators to analyse differentiation among the strategic profiles of universities.…”