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An assessment of the first “scientific habilitation” for university appointments in Italy

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Abstract

Nations with non-competitive higher education systems and with high levels of corruption, are more exposed to phenomena of discrimination and favoritism in faculty recruitment. Italy is a case in point, as shown by empirical studies, judicial reports and media attention. Governments have intervened repeatedly to reduce the problem, with scarce success. The 2010 reforms to the university recruitment system provided that access to the ranks of associate and full professor would now be possible only through an initial “scientific habilitation” to be awarded by sectorial committees of national experts. The objective of this work is to analyze the relationship of the recent habilitation procedure outcomes to the actual scientific merit of the various candidates, as well as to other variables that are explicative of possible practices of favoritism and discrimination. The analyses identify the presence of potential cases of discrimination and favoritism.

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Notes

  1. http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm, last accessed on 01/07/2015.

  2. http://www.roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/02/26/news/tar_lazio_presidente_2014_aumento_consistente_controversie-108226685/, last accessed on 01/07/2015.

  3. Such “unproductive” researchers could publish in journals not indexed by WoS, or codify new knowledge in other forms, such as books, patents, etc.

  4. Law 240 of 2010 was in reality a broad reform of the university system, covering academic recruitment as one part.

  5. The database of the publications used to calculate the median for Italian professors is not made available to the public, but contains only publications voluntarily inserted by any and all individual professors of Italian universities.

  6. For the applicants to the committee-member positions, judging was on the quantity and impact of production over their entire careers, without any normalization for years of academic service.

  7. To isolate all those candidates who were already on staff at national universities, the data downloaded from the habilitation website were crossed with those from the MIUR database on teaching staff (http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php, last accessed on 01/07/2015). An algorithm for disambiguation was applied to resolve cases of homonymy. In several hundred cases the disambiguation was verified manually.

  8. http://www.abilitazione.miur.it/public/pubblicarisultati.php, last accessed 01/07/2015. Unfortunately the regulations dictated that after 60 days from the publication of the committee decisions, the data would be obscured. The site now lists only the successfully accredited candidates.

  9. Our averaging of the indicators implies the assumption that each had equal importance and impact on the final decision by the committee. However we observe that the Spearman index of correlation between the second and third indicators is 0.94. This could have induced the committee members to give greater relative weight to the first indicator. Still, in the minutes of the meetings where the evaluation criteria were declared, the committees give no indication of any such differentiation, therefore our assumption of equal arithmetic weight appears the correct one.

  10. We can compare the effects of these two variables only through the standardized coefficients, since X1 and X2 are measured in different metrics.

  11. The data on careers were extracted from http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php, last accessed 01/07/2015.

  12. The bibliometric dataset used to identify co-authorships is extracted from the Italian Observatory of Public Research (ORP), a database developed and maintained by the authors and derived under license from the Thomson Reuters WoS. Beginning from the raw data of the WoS, and applying a complex algorithm for reconciliation of the author’s affiliation and disambiguation of the true identity of the authors, each publication (article, article review and conference proceeding) is attributed to the university scientist or scientists that produced it (for details, see D’Angelo et al. 2011).

  13. We recall that a candidate can apply for habilitation in different CSs, other than the one where he or she is officially categorized by the MIUR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer, Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR), National Research Council of Italy, Via dei Taurini 19, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo

  2. Department of Engineering and Management, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

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  1. Giovanni Abramo
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  2. Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. An assessment of the first “scientific habilitation” for university appointments in Italy. Econ Polit 32, 329–357 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-015-0016-9

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