A PIECE of advice - if you are a post graduate student and considering a post in an Italian university as a foreign lecturer, think again.
Over the years, one has come to expect the worst of Italian universities. You do not live long in Italy before friends, Romans and the media alike present a picture of a chronically underfunded third level educational system in which, at best, thoroughly inadequate facilities go hand in hand with a byzantine exam system.
At worst, the university picture can be much more depressing, providing a scenario where professors systematically steal postgraduate student research, where exams and degrees are simply "bought" (an especially worrying consideration in the case of medical degrees) and where teaching jobs are awarded on the basis of anything and everything but merit.
A currently continuing investigation into allegedly irregular recruitment practices at Rome's La Sapienza University only serves to make the latter point. The fact that staff and students there jokingly refer to certain university posts as "jobs for lovers" or "jobs for the brother in law" suggests nothing too meritocratic about methods of hiring.
There are, of course, many good and decent people working in Italian universities, people with a vocational commitment. Yet, Italian universities inevitably reflect the corrupt, clientelist non meritocracy created by 44 years of Christian Democrat dominated public life.
Next week, however, and by no means for the first time, Italian universities will receive some very unfavourable publicity when a so called Committee for the Defence of Foreign Lecturers [In Italy]" takes its case to the European Parliament in Strasbourg where if hopes to meet, among others, the Social Affairs Commissioner, Padraig Flynn.
The questions that will be asked in the European Parliament next week represent just the latest stage in a 10 year legal battle, fought both in Italy and at the European Court of Justice, on the work conditions of foreign lecturers (lettori). Essentially, it is a battle to establish that a foreign lecturer is entitled to the same conditions of work and rate of pay as a comparable Italian lecturer, in accordance with fundamental EU principles on freedom of movement for workers in the EU as stipulated in Article 48 of the Treaty of Rome.
Foreign lecturers have long been discriminated against in Italian universities in that they regularly work much longer hours and do more teaching than their Italian colleagues for less pay. Just to add insult to injury, foreign lecturers also used to receive their pay only twice or sometimes once a year.
Furthermore, until recently, foreign lecturers were not guaranteed tenure of contract but rather automatically lost their jobs after six years. Thanks to the private initiative of aggrieved lecturers, this tatter regulation was successfully contested, being ruled illegal by a European Court of Justice judgment of May 1989. The failure of Italian universities, via the Italian government, to respond to that judgment, however, meant that by 1992, the European Commission had initiated "Infringement Proceedings" against Italy under Article 169 of the Rome treaty.
These "proceedings" are basically a threat to take an EU member country to the European Court of Justice for its failure to implement EU law. The Italian government's response could hardly be called fast, yet it did finally introduce legislation last June which effectively ended discrimination against foreign lecturers on conditions and pay.
At this point, the story should be over and foreign lecturers set up to live in Italy, happily ever after. Not so. Last November, an agreement between the Italian government and the confederated trade union CGIL (closely allied to the ex communist Democratic Left or PDS) effectively moved the goal posts by "downgrading" foreign lecturers (henceforth considered "technicians") and, at one fell swoop, almost halving their wages and nearly doubling their hours.
The suspicion must remain that some figures in the Italian academic world are guilty of xenophobic bad faith by the downgrading of their foreign colleagues. Foreigners can be infuriating. They are beyond manipulation. They simply refuse to accept the ground rules of good old clientelism.
For the time being, the European Commission sits and watches, hoping for what a Commission spokesperson this week called "an amicable resolution". If, however, the Commission sees no movement on the issue, then it may be obliged to remind Italy that agreements with the social partners which prove discriminatory against a particular category can also become the object of "Infringement Proceedings". The big stick may have to be waved one more time at those naughty academies.