Students protest in Italy

London - Italian students’ protest movement, known as Onda Anomala (Anomalous Wave), raged as the reforms of the school sector was approved by the upper chamber of the Parliament.

After marching, demonstrating and taking over academic institutes for over a month, further initiatives of protest are underway, in Italy as well as in the main European capitals, as the law proposed by education minister Mariastella Gelmini received the majority with PDL’s and Northern League’s votes, despite centre-left parties PD and IDV were opposed and christian UDC abstained.

One of the main challenges of Ms Gelmini’s law, set to come into force by the end of the year, is to tackle the deep-rooted tendencies of nepotism and cronyism of the baroni (barons), omnipotent professors with the power to determine the academic future of students and researchers. To put an end to such practice, widespread in most Italian universities, especially in the South, education minister announced a bill aimed at controlling the level of productivity within every academic institute and the choice of new researchers.

The new measures oblige university boards to total transparency in their expenses and budgets and further funds will be devoted only to institutes that will show to have carried out quality research. One of the main goals of the minister is to make the many Italian researchers working abroad go back to Italy.

However, the reforms also contain fund cuts within the academic research and this has caused students’ protests to spread all over the country and the unions to call for a national strike of the whole education sector in November 14^th. According to the organizers, a whopping 200,000 students, researchers and teachers gathered in Rome and marched to Montecitorio, palace of the government.

By further curtailing the funds aimed at the academic research, the new government’s measure is bound to frustrate the demand for higher quality in the education system. A recent OECD report has shown that while in Italy the money devoted to students of primary and secondary school is above the average of the OECD countries, regarding the university funding, the Italian rate is nearly one-quarter below the average.

These cuts on the budgets, as unions, teachers and students organisations predict, will have disastrous consequences. The already tottering university sector, they maintain, cannot afford further cuts in its funds without suffering from greater withdrawals of researchers leaving Italy to the other main European countries such as the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, or the United States, where governments devote more money and a fairer regulation on the performance of the research.

Among the implications of these new cuts are the introduction of higher taxes for students, less resources for labs and academic institutes and lower hiring perspectives as for ten lecturers retired there will be a turnover of only three replacements.

At present, Italian universities owe their development to PhD students and researchers who work for nothing, or almost nothing, and with very little perspectives for the future. Instead of bringing about incentives for an early retirement and a higher rate of employments, the government wants to halt the new entries, causing a very slow process of turnover in the hiring process within academic institutes.

Ms Gelmini claims that saving this money will reduce the waste and corruption that is widely recognised as the problem of Italian universities. However, the conclusion protesters draw is that with less money available the competition will be fiercer than now and cronyism and nepotism even more persistent.

Demonstrations in every main European capital were organised by erasmus students, teachers, lecturers, researchers in support of the protests taking place in Italy. Claudia Baldoli, lecturer of History at Newcastle University, is one of the many victims of the Italian university system: “I came to the UK because in Italy there was no future for me. Among my university friends, only one has found a job, the others are employed only with short-term contracts, and paid less than a thousand euro per month. In Italy” she continues “the announcements for PhDs are public but the results are up to the baroni, the barons, professors who have the power to place who they want. In the UK you can find the adverts in the papers and the best wins. These demonstrations are against the nepotism dominating the university system and the fact that they want to further cut the funds for the research, already lower than anywhere else in Europe.”

Starting from Rome, the protest of students, researchers, teachers and lecturers has moved beyond the national borders and spread all over the continent, where Italian expats have shown their support against the latest government’s decisions.

The protest against these measures does not seem to stop. Not only have students occupied the halls of many universities, sleeping, self-managing classes and organizing protests, but they also carried out initiatives of protest over the internet, “defacing” for a couple of hours the website of finance minister Giulio Tremonti, showing in the homepage the slogan “If they block our future we will block their websites,” and signed “Anomalous Wave. You won’t stop us.”

Italian journalist Angela Corrias reports from London.

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