No antidote to academic corruption in Italy

A letter from Zvani Rossetti, Cagliari

Dear Editor,

Your recent David Aliaga interview [Doctoral torture, JUST Response, Dec 21 2002] reveals nothing new about the Italian higher education system. The facts described by Aliaga are part of the everyday experience of all of us here in Italy. Italian academics and students are well aware of the mechanisms and unwritten rules that govern progress at all levels of the curricula from doctorate to professorship. To complain about Aliaga's letters and statements is therefore to attempt to argue against hard facts, which is useless and can easily add insult to injury.

What is surprising and worrying is that Italian academia appears impervious both to Aliaga's claims and to those allegations of Italian academic corruption that have been repeatedly put forward not only by JUST Response but also by Nature and Science and denounced by international associations and eminent figures from international culture. Similarly surprising and worrying is the silence of our state institutions, the arrogance of our bureaucracy and the ambiguities of CUN [the Italian national universities council] in the Aliaga case. For example, rather than investigate, as they ought to have done, they chose instead to define the examination committee’s failure to turn up on July 25 1991 as simply a "strange episode".

Aliaga is right that academic corruption is a human disease and can affect all countries. The difference is that in Italy we do not have antidotes, while other countries do. Other countries have means of encouraging, sustaining and rewarding academic merit and intellectual integrity while identifying and isolating corrupt procedures and this makes up an important component of student education in the USA and in Canada, for example. Here in Italy, on the contrary, we seldom recognize merit, all too often promote mediocrity and never reward integrity.

Perhaps when some Italian university decides to introduce into its statutes the statement that the university belongs to the students there will be a change. In that case much of the merit will go to David Aliaga.

Zvani Rossetti
Associate Professor, Department of Neuroscience
University of Cagliari & CNR Institute of Neuroscience, Italy

Note: This letter was published by JUST Response on January 8 2003.

UP Return to top

Back to Page 1 Return to opening page