The So-Called Italian Ivory Tower

"Abstract

Italian universities hire professors in a way that is entirely different from the approach of other European and American universities. In Italy, there are 77 universities. The law states that, when a university announces a job opening in a given discipline, all the professors of that discipline, regardless of their affiliation, must cast a secret ballot to elect the members of the selection committee.

Over the years, powerful and scheming professors have used the electoral process to fix the outcome of the hiring process. The scheme begins with the identification of the individual who, according to these scheming professors, should get the job.

Then comes the election of the selection committee. In order to match the expectation of the scheming professors with the choice of the selection committee, the members of this committee – elected by law through a secret ballot – must obviously be pre-selected among complacent collaborators and their name notified to all the voters. Every voter receives the information for whom to vote via email, often enclosed in an attachment facetiously called a "holy card." In every election, a large majority of professors vote according to the received instruction because they believe that rebelling against this rigged system is hopeless and dangerous for their career and that of their collaborators. Their only hope is to wait their own turn by offering deference, loyalty and silence ("omertà" in Italian) to the group of scheming professors.

It is fair and sad to say that, in Italian universities, mediocrity rather than excellence is the final objective of selection committees in a large majority of job openings. In this paper we analyze the election of 27 selection committees in agricultural economics. Surprisingly, the votes’ distribution is rather uniform among the elected members of all the committees. This finding constitutes the fingerprint of the scheming professors in the crime of fixing the hiring process." (Quintino Paris, JUST Response)

In this essay, Prof. Quirino Paris adduces formal mathematical proof to illustrate the rigging of teaching staff selection procedures, or concorsi, at Italian universities. ["This article was first published on JUST Response on October 26 2005. Quirino Paris has been a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, since 1969. In 2004, he was proudly expelled from SIDEA, the Italian society of agricultural economics. He had denounced the colonizing activities of some scheming professors for fixing the hiring process throughout Italy"]

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