Disappeared (if there ever was) from the political agenda of the priorities of the Country, stored in a hurry for the resignation of the former minister Lorenzo Fioramonti which claimed more and more resources, the universities of the Italian langue. Stifled by bureaucracy, “intoxicated by a (fake) corporatization and evaluation mechanisms must be applied with a rare fanaticism” as the synthesis that travels in an appeal signed by over 200 academics. The title is significant: “Disintossichiamoci – Directions for the future”. A document published on Roars that is turning over the universities to collect even more signatures.
More than a manifesto on the future of the Italian university, is a cry: “teaching and Research – it is a fact, yet it seems to be a taboo number three: – by the time they are not the most free – law – Under the senseless pressure that urges you to ‘produce’ every year, at every turn and more, the research is in the grip of a real bubble of the titles, which becomes more and more of the already deadly to publish or perish in a rubbish or perish. At the same time, constant pressure to ‘deliver’ training modeled on the demands of the productive world. The modernization that has programmatically ripped off the university from the tower of ivory has meaning is not other that the way, the ’third way’, to the world of private interests”.
And still: “thanks to the establishment of this market logic, the freedom of research and teaching – although protected by art. 33 of the Constitution – it is reduced now to freedom of enterprise. The model to which you are required to submit a regime of the production of useful knowledge (useful in the first place to increase private profits), which controls the ways time and place of this production, according to a management of the authoritarian who comes to expropriate researchers and scholars of the same faculty of judgment, now subject to criteria without internal justification smuggled to objective”.
The promoters are Valeria Pinto , professor of Philosophy at the Federico II of Naples, the sociologist David Borrelli ( Suor Orsola Benincasa university of Naples), Maria Chiara Pievatolo , professor of political philosophy at the university of Pisa, and Federico Bertoni , who teaches Theory of literature at Bologna. “This is the first base to propose – or to try at least to conceive of a different model of research and knowledge”, explains Fr. Among the signatures, those of Tomaso Montanari, Alberto Abruzzese, Marco Belpoliti, Alessandro Barbero, Alessandro Dal Lago, Marco Revelli, Antonella Riem .
The appeal comes on the eve of the third national evaluation of research quality (Vqr) for the period 2015-2019. A system always only been, revised some of the guidelines in November last year with the new decree of the ministry of education. The Agency has just published the announcement of competition to select the groups of expert raters. And the academy is in fibrillation.
The document 200 is net on the mechanisms of evaluation of scientific research: “it Is a matter of numbers and measures of scientific, know it all, have nothing, and nothing is guarantee in terms of the value and quality of knowledge. To pre-set percentages of excellence and unacceptability, split with medians or prescribe thresholds, ordering of the rankings, start again in the rating of the magazines, all this, together with the most oppressive practices of control in the form of certifications, accreditations, reports, reviews, audits etc, has a unique function: it’s the competition forced individuals, groups, or institutions within the one reality which gives the title to establish values, i.e. the market, in this case, the global market of education and research, that is an invention recently”.
The theme is crucial, for the assessment of knowledge , and therefore the destination of the funds that guide the research. “More and more often today you write, and do research to reach a threshold of productivity rather than to add knowledge to humanity”, to the complaint.
According to the analysis contained in the appeal, “the logic of the competitive market, it is set as true, and their command of ethics, to oppose, which has resulted in, for the few who have tried, having to defend against allegations of inefficiency, irresponsibility, waste of public money, the defence of corporative privilege and caste”.
The signatories of the document claimed a change of course, the radical . “Many now believe that this model of knowledge management is toxic and unsustainable in the long term. The devices of performance measurement and evaluation, reward is to convert the scientific research (asking for directions) in search of competitive advantages (ask to get in), and comes to put at risk the meaning and the role of knowledge for society”. Therefore, “the time has come for a radical change, if you want to avoid the implosion of the system of knowledge as a whole. The bureaucratization of research and the managerializzazione of higher education are likely to become the Chernobyl of our model of social organization”.
The way out proposals? “what is needed today is to reaffirm the principles that are to protect the right of the whole society, to have a knowledge, a teaching, a research free – the protection, that is, of the very fabric of which is made a democracy – and for this protection to those who dedicate themselves to knowledge. Serves a choice of the field, capable of rammagliare from the bottom that resists as a critical force, the ability to discriminate, to distinguish what you can keep together: sharing and excellence, freedom of inquiry and neovalutazione, level of training and rapid supply of cheap labour, free access to knowledge and monopolies of the market.”
“The Republic will fight always in defense of the freedom of information, to its readers and to all those who have at heart the principles of democracy and civil coexistence”
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