Academic apartheid in Italy
Favouritism and elitism have been common features of any competitive environment, including academic medicine, for a long time, but interest the media in only a minority of cases. However, their burden could become staggering as witnessed in historical and current Italian academia. To my, possibly naive, eyes and the eyes of numerous disenchanted colleagues, the present Universita is run by a few very senior academics who foster a power system based on a frequent disregard of widely accepted values of merit. These senior academics have produced a pyramidal structure in academia encompassing favourite professionals and less fortunate professionals, who remain neglected, particularly in schools of medicine. The two exclusive options of favouring some fortunate professionals or rejecting others have created a sense of feeble justice among Italian clinicians working in academia where there are no national fi lters to recruit or promote professionals, and where neither a research excellence framework nor national student surveys exist to stimulate the quality of educational activity. Several eff orts have been made in the past to limit this power system, but their failure has been a result of the absence of accountability in the recruitment and promotion choices and by the arbitrary component left to the assessment panels by all political reforms. The most recent example dates back to 2008, when the Gelmini reform should have warranted transparence of academic careers in Italy by establishing objective bibliometric eligibility criteria. In particular, the new laws affi rmed that only candidates reaching two of three bibliometric thresholds should have become eligible for associate or full professorship after assessment by committees of Italian commissaries. Discussing the limits of bibliometric indices is beyond the aims of this statement, but I believe that most Italian academics were surprised by the substantial change from no rules to some strict rules (albeit not perfect) Unfortunately, the reform did not impair the two major limitations we have in Italy ie, the arbitrary assessment of the committees and the absence of accountability for the quality of eligibilities allowed. Indeed, criticisms and even scandals arose when these laws were actually adopted in our country, from evidence that kinship, affinity, or acquaintance between candidates and commissaries, senior directors, and senior academics of medicine aff ected the probability of an academic promotion and qualifi cation. Although legal appeals are still pending with good probability of success, many Italian academics that were judged ineligible for promotion, despite easily fulfi lling all objective criteria because of commissaries' blindness, were obliged to remain at the margins of academia. Ultimately, this isolation has meant that an academic boycott is underway an extreme situation unjustifi ed in the medical community, but pretty frequent in many Italian universities, mostly in schools of medicine. There are good professionals legitimately deserving an academic promotion who cannot obtain offi cial recognition, only because they do not share any congeniality with the senior academics. I am truly afraid of the idea of getting older, relinquishing my honesty to any university director, and I feel humiliated at roadblocks, as I have been denied the opportunity of securing an educational role in my university and taking a fully active part in its academic life. The global scientifi c community should take note of these issues in academia.
The Lancet