LUCCA, ITALY — When Sotirios A. Tsaftaris left Northwestern University near Chicago to become an assistant professor in this walled, medieval city in Tuscany, most of his colleagues expressed doubts. In Lucca? And they speak English?
“I decided to come because it’s highly interdisciplinary here,” said Mr. Tsaftaris, sitting in a vaulted-ceiling conference room of IMT Lucca, a graduate school and research university. “We work in research units that are complementary.”
“I think it’s crucial to keep your head open as a scientist,” said Mr. Tsaftaris, 34, a native of Greece.
While Italy is popular among exchange students, particularly undergraduates doing a semester or a year abroad, few foreign graduate students receive their full education or begin their academic careers here.
According to various Italian universities, only about 1 percent of researchers and teachers at higher education institutions here come from abroad.
Continue reading the main storyPotential overseas researchers and teachers face numerous hurdles: a language barrier, bureaucratic complications, an arduous tenure track, a scarcity of online information, a lack of funds and privileges granted to Italian university insiders that exclude foreigners.
As a result, Italy, a country laden in debt, loses out on a potential area of growth: higher education.
State funds for education have steadily decreased. Many public institutions lack money, and the teaching staff is not young: Almost 30 percent of researchers, 60 percent of assistant professors and more than 86 percent of ordinary professors are older than 50, according to Italy’s Finance Ministry. The few foreigners who work at Italian universities are primarily lecturers hired for their language skills.
The picture is quite different at IMT Lucca, which was founded in 2005, and where about half of Ph.D. candidates and many assistants come from abroad. But institutions like IMT Lucca struggle, even with good online resources, private financing and young, bilingual faculty and staff.
“How can we be attractive if I can’t tell my applicants now if they can compete for tenure in three years’ time?” asked Fabio Pammolli, the founder and former director of IMT Lucca.
“We can save our teachers from the forest of Italian regulations by making recruitment procedures culturally accessible to foreigners,” he said, walking through the corridors of a 17th-century convent that has been turned into a university dormitory. “We can hire assistant professors in four months, but we just cannot hire full-time professors in a reasonable time frame.”
The nine tenured professors hired at IMT Lucca since 2011 are all Italians with international backgrounds who were more attuned to the slow pace of normal procedures.
“When they offered me this position, I was thinking of moving to Brussels,” said Massimo Riccaboni, 39, an associate professor of economics and management at IMT Lucca. “I decided to stay in Italy for personal and many other good reasons, but the academic career here is so slow moving that it scares people away.” Previously, he was a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon and a researcher at Stanford university.
For decades, professors in Italy have been hired through a complicated entrance procedure theoretically open to Ph.D. holders from anywhere in the world. Practically speaking, it was accessible only to those who could read Italian and who knew about openings often posted during the summer holidays in the national gazette, the Italian government’s journal of record.
The Education Ministry tried to improve the quality of the selection process by introducing a Web-based certification. Starting July 27, applicants could upload their résumés and publications to a Web site to apply for eligibility to teach at the university level.
“Up until now, it has been an open loop. Now we are paying greater attention to transparency, clear rules, and a time limit when hiring academic staff,” the Italian Education Minister, Francesco Profumo, said by telephone. “New generations have spent time abroad, and the country is ready to be more international. Building a reputation all over the world, however, is a complex process that takes time.”
Some critics of the new online procedure say the months of waiting to be registered as a professor in Italy goes against the job market’s usual practices, especially in high-demand fields like computer sciences, hard sciences and economics. In other countries, job fairs may connect thousands of potential professors with hundreds of schools in just a few days.
Others doubt that the online application will solve the longstanding issue of opaque selection at Italian universities.
“Italian entrance procedures have always been accused of being corrupt or to give way to insiders,” said Roberto Perotti, a professor of economic politics at Bocconi University in Milan, who has written extensively about the Italian university system. “Beyond that, the red tape is exhausting. This is why foreign researchers don’t come.”
As in other parts of Europe, Italian public university professors are civil servants. But here, once hired, their salaries automatically increase by seniority, regardless of their research productivity or merit.
“It’s a perverse system,” Mr. Perotti said. “The only researchers who have incentives to come to Italy are those who are not very good, because they earn independently from how much they produce.”
“If a department at Harvard hires an unskilled teacher, they’ll lose students and this will have consequences,” he added. “In the Italian public system, nobody checks on researchers and professors, and nobody is directly accountable for ruining that university’s reputation. Those public servants will have no consequences for their bad decisions.”
Other critics say that Italian universities do little to nurture academics trying to make a name for themselves outside Italy. Despite a recent increase in English-language courses, most Italian universities do not offer courses or grant graduate degrees in English, making it more difficult for scholars to publish in international journals.
“For better or for worse, the lingua franca of many sciences is English, and Italian academics are penalized in comparison to their Dutch colleagues, for example,” said Fabrizio Bernardi, a sociology professor at the European University Institute in Florence. “They have fewer chances to get grants and funds from abroad.”
Italian education experts are concerned about a weak international reputation, the emigration of talented students and teachers, and the fact that Italy is not promoting itself as a cradle of innovation.
“What’s really crucial is the international mobility of young students,” said Alexander Peterson, 31, who earned his Ph.D. in physics at Boston University last year and is now an assistant professor at IMT Lucca. “Developing a young career has a lot of added risk, and I am glad we are focusing on the international resource arena here, not just on the Italian one.”
IMT Lucca professors are proving to be reputable scientists and competent fund-raisers.
Together with their colleagues at Italy’s National Research Council, IMT Lucca researchers have received a grant of a €9 million, or $11.1 million, to study crises in financial, energy and transport systems. In November, they will begin coordinating 17 universities in a €5.1 million project aimed at providing European institutions with a framework to measure systemic risk in global financial markets and networks.
Alberto Bemporad, the university’s newly appointed director, has garnered seven international grants in the past three years.
“I understand that we are a small university, but the institute is exposed to the country’s problems,” said Mr. Pammolli, the university’s first director. “We are trying to innovate by opening up universities and researchers’ mobility. It’s like the canary in the mine. If it gets sick, sooner or later all the miners will fall sick, too.”
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