Links
Archives
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
|
Italian Family & Friends Plan Recall the pietoso rank of Italy on the recent lists of the world’s best universities. Among the top fifty, Italy, with its strong economy and spectacular cultural traditions, is simply absent; on the list of the top 500, it starts appearing, spottily, down in the hundreds, easily outranked by a number of smaller, poorer countries. What’s interesting about Italy’s national disgrace is that everyone knows why it’s happening, but, with some exceptions, no one gives a shit. As one high-ranking Italian university administrator explains in an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, the Italians prefer a “personalized” system of academic hiring to the cold objective approach that in part accounts for America’s dominance of the lists. In expressing “solidarity” with a now-suspended rector who has been particularly blatant, even by Italian standards, in handing out tenured positions to family and friends, the national coordinator of the Association of University Teachers “acknowledged that Italian academe's ‘personalized’ hiring and promotion practices lend themselves to suspicions of the kind now surrounding Mr. Tosi.” Yet how unsporting it would be to impose upon Italy the predatory capitalist practices of the United States. |