Europe

Home page

Europe

In Italy, Education Protests Spread

27 November 2010 02:09 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. This week, a group of students broke into the hall of the Italian Senate in Rome, while another occupied the Colosseum; in Pisa, students took over a runway at the airport; in Palermo, they sat on the railway tracks; in Florence and Milan, they clashed with the police, while at a dozen universities, researchers dragged their sleeping bags onto the roofs, where they have been sleeping as a sign of protest, APA reports quoting â€œThe New York Timesâ€.
The demonstrations, which spread to many other Italian cities this month, were aimed at a new bill, currently being discussed in the lower house, to overhaul the Italian university system. If it is approved in upcoming weeks, it will pass to the Senate, as long as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconiâ€™s tottering majority holds and his conservative government remains in power.
Education Minister Mariastella Gelminiâ€™s proposed bill is one of the most far-reaching education overhaul efforts in recent years. It aims to reorganize the governance of institutions and the system of recruiting university teachers, and to change the way funds are allocated, by rewarding meritorious institutions and forcing schools that are running a deficit to close, the minister said.
The students are also protesting sharp cuts imposed by Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti on many Italian ministries.
For 2011, according to data posted on the Senate Web site, the government has allocated â‚¬6.9 billion, or $9.1 billion, to universities. This includes an additional â‚¬800,000 â€” yet to be approved â€” that Mr. Tremonti proposed just this month. But the extra funds have done little to calm tempers. The money, critics say, is insufficient to counter the deep crisis facing public education.
For the first time in 30 years, when classes began this autumn, researchers â€” who make up about 40 percent of the teaching staff â€” had abandoned their lecterns in protest of the bill, which they said would essentially dismantle public universities.
As a result, many courses usually listed in university curriculums were not offered. Many other courses began weeks late.
Overcrowding is common at dozens of institutions: on average, the ratio at Italian universities is 19.5 students per teacher, compared to an average of 15.4 students per teacher in other European Union member countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The researchersâ€™ protest has made the situation worse. At the University of Turin, for example, biology students had to take the same physics exam as physics students, said Alessandro Ferretti, one of the coordinators of the researchersâ€™ association, Rete 29 Aprile (April 29 Network), named after the day the movement organized throughout the country.
â€œI am aware that we are causing major inconveniences to our students,â€ he said. Researchers are not formally on strike, he emphasized, because their contracts do not oblige them to teach. â€œWe teach because we want to, but if this law doesnâ€™t change, the second semester will just never happen,â€ he said.
Ms. Gelmini has said that she believes that in the long run, her overhaul will streamline Italyâ€™s costly university system, trimming useless degrees and shutting down many of the tiny post-secondary institutions that have mushroomed in recent years.
Moreover, the new rules for governance and recruiting are expected to greatly reduce the influence of so-called university barons, powerful academics who often sway hiring policies.
And hiring teachers is no small matter: many university professors in Italy are reaching retirement age. The Education Ministryâ€™s statistical office estimates that, on average, 18 percent of teaching staff at universities will retire in the next few years, reaching as high as 36 percent in some faculties.
This year, the law faculty at La Sapienza University, Italyâ€™s largest post-secondary institution, lost 38 professors from its staff due to retirement, roughly a fifth of the whole teaching body. They have not been replaced.
But at the same time, under the overhaul, researchers who could eventually fill the gaps left by retirees would only be able to maintain their status for a maximum of eight years, and critics of the changes say this makes their situation precarious.
â€œWhat is at stake here is the very existence of Italian universities,â€ said Alberto Civica, an official with the U.I.L. trade union, which represents about 500 researchers and 300 professors.
â€œAnd all that this reform does is ignore the real problems of our universities.â€
Previous overhauls, he said, have been equally ineffective.
If anything, critics say, the plethora of legislation that has been passed in recent years to better the Italian post-secondary education system has actually made things worse.
From 1990 to 2006, there were 1,371 newly enacted laws, bills, ministry decrees, general norms and internal rules applying to Italian universities, according to statistics from the Education Ministry, compiled by Alessandro Monti, a professor of economic policies and university legislation at the University of Camerino and author of the book â€œInvestigation on the Decline of Italian University,â€ published in 2007. More laws have since been introduced.
The result is a system that forces students to juggle their education amid ever changing rules, students say.
For example, a 1999 overhaul that introduced a division between a three-year bachelorâ€™s degree and a two-year masterâ€™s degrees (intended to equalize Italian degrees to those of other E.U. countries) prompted a proliferation of degrees and a subsequent recruitment of new professors, often hired on short-term contracts, sometimes for little or no pay. Some universities offered 12 different degrees within the same field.
â€œIt is a Kafkaesque situation,â€ Mr. Monti said. â€œThere is no money, far too many courses, far too many directives and zero control over their application. But what I fear the most is the disqualification of our universities.â€
Giada Ianni, 27, will have taken about 50 exams when she graduates next year. In 2003, she started a three-year, 30-exam architecture degree at Romeâ€™s Valle Giulia, one of the two architecture schools of La Sapienza University. She had anticipated that she would also take a 2-year graduate degree. But by the time she had finished her undergraduate studies, an overhaul had come along and the 2-year degree that she had chosen no longer existed. She had to fight to have her exams validated within the new system, which meant taking 20 more exams.
But she received a region-funded scholarship to help pay for her undergraduate degree. Students entering the university system today may not be that lucky. In October, the government approved a bill that cut scholarships by 90 percent to â‚¬26 million for 2011, and to â‚¬13 million for 2012.
Squeezed between bureaucracy, decreasing scholarships and a lack of basic structures like cafeterias, university students say they have little motivation to enter the world of academia.
â€œYouth are an opportunity for this country and they just donâ€™t get it,â€ said Ms. Ianni, the mother of a 20-month-old who lives in a town 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, from the capital and gets up at 6 a.m. to drive to the city center with her baby.
â€œAnd my child needs a public university exactly as I do.â€