Italy: The “Outsmarted” State?

Abstract

Analysing and understanding Italian HE is a complicated endeavour, in particular for outsiders. For numerous reasons, it nevertheless stands out as a highly interesting case from a political and administrative perspective. On the one hand, the Italian HE system bears various similarities to the French system, which has historically been marked by strong vertical state steering (see Chapter 3; Esposti and Geraci 2010: 112). Moreover, it shares the peculiarity with France that universities as overarching autonomous institutions and collective actors were overshadowed by the faculties for a large part of the past century. This may appear as a surprise, as the earliest European universities — the Sorbonne and the University of Bologna — were “born” on present-day French and Italian territory. On the other hand, Italian HE distinguishes itself from French HE in various ways and is instead sometimes compared to the German academic system due to its tradition of powerful full professors, often referred to in Italian as baroni (see Manghi 1987). Hence, Italian HE essentially is a paradox and in many ways a mystery. For some, it represents centralization par excellence, in which universities are basically “genetically modified organisms” of state design (Tocci 2009). For others, they are bastions of academic “clans”, which have taken on their own inner lives and escaped state control and steering (see Manghi 1987).