Italian rectors give their departments preferential treatment

Italian rectors’ home departments grow more quickly than others, according to a study that suggests 2009 anti-nepotism reforms have done little to curb favouritism.

Researchers at Bergamo, Augsburg and Marche Polytechnic universities used national personnel data covering all public sector faculty from 2001 to 2021 to calculate that during leaders’ tenure their departments grew 9 per cent more than would otherwise be expected.

To do so, they had to control for other factors that could explain why a rector’s home department might be flourishing, including larger or successful units being more likely to produce an institutional leader, and fluctuating national funding.

One of the study’s authors, Michele Meoli, associate professor of finance at Bergamo, told Times Higher Education that the idea came from a co-author seeing over-recruitment at rectors’ old departments first-hand.

The unexplained growth of rectors’ departments was seen before and after the 2009 university governance reforms named for the then-education minister Mariastella Gelmini, which gave rectors more control over their budgets in the name of cost efficiency, but also sought to curb nepotism by limiting them to a single term and making it compulsory to have non-university members on executive boards.

According to the personnel figures, the Gelmini reforms had little impact on favouritism. Many of the checks the laws introduced have also never been used, such as the power to fire rectors, Dr Meoli said, while many universities have the minimum number of external board members.

He said senate subcommittees could be brought in to supervise recruitment and personnel budgeting, reporting their findings externally.

“Academic communities...can benefit from a deeper understanding of the political dynamics that emerge when leaders are chosen through elections,” he and his co-authors write in the journal Studies in Higher Education, suggesting general faculty scrutiny, as well as board outsiders, would better balance the power of rectors.

While he said it was possible favouritism could be unintentional, the fact that it was seen in nationwide data over two decades suggests it is a well-entrenched practice. The study, which used hiring data from the terms of 241 rectors at all 68 public universities, could not pick up other forms of favouritism, such as their choice of deputies, he added.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com