Autonomia e politica dell’Università: un discorso anestetizzato

From the approval of Law no. 240 of 2010 on, the academic debate on the future of universities has progressively been “anaesthetized” in Italy, in the direction of a misleading weakening of the critical debate on the drawbacks of such a reformist pathway. In the last twenty years, the reformist process of Italian universities has been founded on the accreditation of degree courses and the evaluation of research products that represent two cornerstones of the wider process of innovation in higher education institutions, in tune with the improvement of the double degree courses introduced by the Bologna Process (1999). Because of the separation of scientific sectors imposed on aspiring professors, the most recent normative actions have indirectly limited interdisciplinary research and do not include the assessment of teaching quality for professors’ careers. The proposal in this paper deals with the normative and institutional emphasis on the tenets of accreditation, evaluation and rationalization inspiring Italian university reformism, in line with the normative pathway that strengthened the functional complexity of the entire system. In this sense, the institution of the National Agency of Evaluation and Research (ASN), along with the introduction of the Scientific National License (ASN), determined a hypertrophied bureaucratic grasp on academic life, in order to conform with the quantitative parameters that have indirectly reduced scientific and didactic autonomy through the introduction of rationalization and effectiveness of academic services. Hence follows the opportunity to investigate the most significant normative steps that built this reformist mindset featuring the normative anxiety and complexity of application, in tune with the anaesthetization of public debate on the future of Italian universities overwhelmed by the process of harmonization of higher education institutions. Market competition, accountability, platformization, rationalization, democratization and inclusion are only some of the main keywords of such a renovation challenge. Behind all this is the theoretical reflection upon the social role played by higher education institutions in the era of hyperconnected relationships, with the construction of the “good university” investigated by Raewyn Connell (2019) and the implementation of “free speech on campus” investigated Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillan (2017).