Un editoriale della rivista scientifica Nature del 16/10/2008 commenta i tagli all’università italiana. Potete scaricarlo inversione pdf: ArticoloNature
o leggerlo online più sotto in questo post:
In an attempt to boost its struggling
economy, Italy’s government is focusing on easy, but unwise,
targets.
It is a dark and angry time for
scientists in Italy, faced as they are with a government acting out
its own peculiar cost-cutting
philosophy. Last week, tens of
thousands of researchers took tothe streets to register their
opposition to a proposed bill designed to control civil-service
spending (see page 840). If passed, as expected,
the bill would
dispose of nearly 2,000 temporary research staff, who
are the
backbone of the country’s grossly understaffed research institutions — and about half of whom had already been selected for
permanent jobs.
Even as the scientists were marching,
Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government, which took office in
May, decreed that the budgets
of both universities and research
could be used as funds to shore up
Italy’s banks and credit
institutes. This is not the first time that Berlusconi has targeted
universities. In August, he signed a decree that cut
university
budgets by 10% and allowed only one in five of any vacant
academic
positions to be filled. It also allowed universities to convert
into
private foundations to bring in additional income. Given the current
climate, university rectors believe that the latter step will be
used
to justify further budget cuts, and that it will eventually
compel them
to drop courses that have little commercial value, such
as the classics,
or even basic sciences. As that bombshell hit at
the beginning of the
summer holidays, the implications have only
just been fully recognized — too late, as the decree is now being
transformed into law.
Meanwhile, the government’s minister
for education, universities
and research, Mariastella Gelmini, has
remained silent on all issues
related to her ministry except
secondary schools, and has allowed
major and destructive
governmental decisions to be carried through
without raising
objection. She has refused to meet with scientists and academics to
hear their concerns, or explain to them the policies
that seem to
require their sacrifice. And she has failed to delegate an
undersecretary to handle these issues in her place.
Scientific organizations affected by
the civil-service bill have instead
been received by the bill’s
designer, Renato Brunetta, minister of public
administration and
innovation. Brunetta maintains that little can be
done to stop or
change the bill — even though it is still being discussed
in
committees, and has yet to be voted on by both chambers. In a
newspaper interview, Brunetta also likened researchers to capitani
di
ventura, or Renaissance mercenary adventurers, saying that to
give
them permanent jobs would be “a little like killing them”.
This misrepresents an issue that researchers have explained to him —
that any country’s scientific base
requires a healthy ratio of permanent to
temporary staff, with the
latter (such as postdocs) circulating between
solid, well equipped,
permanent research labs. In Italy, scientists tried
to tell
Brunetta, this ratio has become very unhealthy.
The Berlusconi government may feel that
draconian budget measures are necessary, but its attacks on Italy’s
research base are unwise
and short-sighted. The government has
treated research as just
another expense to be cut, when in fact it
is better seen as an investment in building a twenty-first-century
knowledge economy. Indeed,
Italy has already embraced this concept
by signing up to the European
Union’s 2000 Lisbon agenda, in which
member states pledged to raise
their research and development (R&D)
budgets to 3% of their gross
domestic product. Italy, a G8 country,
has one of the lowest R&D expenditures in that group — at
barely 1.1%, less than half that of
comparable countries such as
France and Germany.
The government needs to consider more
than short-term gains
brought about through a system of decrees made
easy by compliant
ministers. If it wants to prepare a realistic
future for Italy, as it should,
it should not idly reference the
distant past, but understand how
research works in Europe in the
present.
Nature, Vol 455, Issue no. 7215, 16 October 2008