The university system

Head: Carla Barbati

Year 2018

The university system has been affected by an extensive reform, initiated by Law no. 240 of 30 December 2010, which required universities, the scientific and academic community to respond to new objectives of quality and efficiency. These components of the system have been invested with important organizational and functional innovations, many of which are expressions of structures, roles and decision-making processes for the functioning and governance of the system, which have also been profoundly modified. The reform changes the "who" decides and the "how much", the "what" and the "how" are decided both by the state administration of the sector and by the university institutions. Beyond the problems posed by the gradual implementation of the reform, the difficulties encountered by the reform in interacting with the context into which it was placed, which was not known to be an "empty context", were significant. The functional innovations introduced by a multitude of subsequent measures have, in fact, been added to, and not always replacing, the provisions of a set of standards stratified over time, whose timing and terms of application have required in primis a not easy verification of their compatibility with the new rules. In the same way, organisational innovations have overlapped with existing solutions and have therefore been confronted with "old" and "new" structures and subjects, who have struggled to express themselves fully on their own role, having first been engaged in often difficult comparisons with a context that has been slow to stabilise.

Almost seven years after the entry into force of the reform, the time is now ripe for an overall reflection on the university system, not only to verify "what has been done" and to express some evaluation on the "how", but above all to request corrective action and/or changes of direction.