Italy: From Bureaucratic Legacy to Reform of the Profession

This chapter explains the shortcomings of the Italian university system reforms, in terms of the effects such reforms have on academics’ salaries and terms of employment. New rules have been established over the last twenty years, designed to make universities more competitive at the international level. The system of recruitment of academics has been repeatedly changed, but reforms have failed to modify a highly inflexible wage structure or to introduce a manageable career system. Weak governance has prevented central bureaucracy and academic management from make any real use of the evaluation and assessment procedures recently introduced at both systemic and institutional levels. A new reform package approved at the end of 2010, is designed to deal with those problems inherited from the past, and to pursue a more meritocratic system of academic pay and promotion, although some observers remain skeptical about the efficacy of such reforms