Pride, Prejudice and Challenges in Italian Higher Education

The Italian university has an old tradition starting from the Middle Ages and coming to nowadays: first created as a place of studying and debating, as time went by it changed its functions: temple of pure knowledge with no connections with real life/world; instrument appropriate to a nationalization, aligned with political power and economical domination of an upper class. The most recent reforms (1999 and 2010), inspired by a more complex vision of the system and touched by the economical crisis, aimed to change this condition from a high degree of discretionary and complexities to independent ranking and impartial standards. The attempt is re-organizing the Italian university as a third type cycle of education, connected to global and international fields, in touch with the transformation of the labour market, and associated to the European Higher Education Area. The challenge in the past decade has been to move the governance on the efficiency level and on a quality system, including ranking for finding allocations as a part of a larger process od transformation. In this prospective, the Quality Assurance (QA) assumes a key role to compensate the institutional delay that had been created. Through a series of new evaluation procedures (AVA) put into action by the newly created Italian Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institute (ANVUR), concerning study course degrees, university institutions, research and professorial activity, the whole Italian Higher Education system is pushed into a new direction in which the quality is considered as the main requirement to promote the most productive and capable institutions. However, a main public debate, with public manifestation of disagreement, opposition and resistance, has clearly characterized the introduction of a new system of evaluation; quality is reached by an important tool for improving Italian university system but, at the same time, quality is perceived as a formal, tricky and difficult procedure that, especially at times of crisis with limited financing resources, can obstruct the way teachers and research institutions work.