I come from Italy, considered under many aspects one of the world’s wealthiest countries—even if our beloved Prime Minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi is candidly trying to drown it down. However, as far as scientific research is involved, Italy compares not with powerhouses such as the United States, the United Kingdom or Japan, but with minor scientific nations. It is a matter of fact that the Italian governments, of whatever political persuasion, have always considered research the last wheel of the train, since Italian politicians have no consciousness that research brings economic and social development. I have been away from my country for many years now, but I have kept an eye on what is going on with Italian research, not because I dream of going back, but due to some kind of masochistic vein, I guess. And I must confess that this year my masochism has been highly entertained.

Italy’s national research bodies and universities are undergoing one of the deepest reforms wanted by Letizia Moratti, the Minister for Education, Universities, and Research—shrinking bureaucracy and trimming the management are the aims which would be achieved by drastically reducing the number of departments of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and other institutes. So far, so good.

It is widely recognized that, above all, CNR, the biggest of the Italian research bodies, needs radical restructuring. The average age of researchers is around 50, the Institute lacks fresh blood, and powerful trade unions exert too strong an influence. Moreover, patronage still outweighs professional competence in recruitment and promotion. Therefore, reform is more than welcome. On the other hand, already facing a 10% budget cut this year, CNR has barely enough money to cover salaries and operating expenses. The resulting hiring freeze will affect youngest researchers most severely, and yet Moratti’s reform plan, besides changing the president of CNR, omits any mention of new financial support.

Another cause of unhappiness was that Moratti has used a consultancy agency to design the reform plan, which is seen by scientists—who were consulted at no stage—as a device to put politicians in control of research bodies. Management of the CNR will be handed over to politicians and applied scientists rather than researchers in the basic sciences.

Italian universities are in need of reorganization as well. The trend over the past decade has been to favor the promotion of associate professors to full professorships, over bringing in fresh brains at the bottom. Last year, for example, saw the creation of 5,218 new full professors versus just 1,344 jobs for researchers, resulting in a paradoxically top-heavy pyramid. As it stands, however, the reform will, if anything, make the already insecure life of young researchers even more uncertain. Under the new scheme proposed by the Minister, new PhDs will be offered a 5-year contract, renewable for another 5 years. After this 10-year period, they will be able to compete for professorships, the winners ending up on a national list from which each university will be able to choose the most suitable candidate. Newly appointed professors will then be offered a 3-year contract, renewable for only another 3 years. Eventually, it will be up to the individual universities to decide whether to offer the professor a permanent job. On the face of it, it looks like an attempt to bring in a more meritocratic system, akin to the U.S. tenure track. But there are problems. For a start, also in this case, new money has been promised, and there is concern that the elusive permanent position will never materialize, since it will always be cheaper to hire someone younger.

According to official sources from the Ministry, “the reform will give greater freedom and flexibility to universities with the introduction of the principle of careful evaluation and selection of the teaching body. A single national selection with only one winner will put a stop to mechanisms which, to date, have favored local appointments.” In fact, local appointments were encouraged by the decentralization of the national system of concorsi (a system of academic appointments based on national competitions), by the previous government, just 6 years ago. This move, too, was supposed to give more freedom to the universities and speed up the recruitment process. The ‘new’ national exam designed to introduce national lists of first- and second-band lecturers for particular scientific sectors—looks very much like the old system under yet another name.

Worse, given the existing saturation at the top of the research system, the fear is that under the new scheme researchers will reach the age of 40, with no contract or further opportunities. The prevailing feeling among researchers is that the next 10 years will see the university world thrown even more into mediocrity, populated by demotivated people facing a constant struggle for survival.

With no new money in the system, the salary for researchers will almost certainly remain at just €1,130 a month and a massive evacuation from universities will be provoked. And, actually, it is a matter of luck to even receive this indecently poor salary. At the beginning of this year, thousands of young researchers threatened to leave the country to find work elsewhere because, although they passed regular concorsi, their positions and salaries had been indefinitely frozen for the previous 2 years. The government recently offered 40 million in an effort to help patch up the mess, but this is seen as nothing more than a drop in the ocean.

Meanwhile, on a visit to Harvard, the Italian government’s chief accountant announces that it intends to spend €100 million a year for the next 10 years on a research institute that still does not exist (there is a website, though). The Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)—a brainchild of the Ministry of the Economy and Finance rather than the Ministry for Education, Universities and Research—will be created in Genoa. The government wants to model the Institute on US centers like MIT, Harvard, and others, and the aim would be to generate research that can be transferred to industry for public benefit.

Needless to say, the feedback from Italy’s chronically underfunded and underdebated reformed universities and research bodies has been largely negative. Again, neither scientists nor academics were consulted by the government. Is it really possible to create an MIT without a nursery of scientists, and by ignoring already existing institutions? Moreover, it is striking that the official document emphasizes the administrative part of the IIT, while scientists are not even mentioned.

The gap between the scientific and the political world was even more obvious to me when Moratti recently came to visit the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò (NYU) and meet with Italian scientists working in the US. This was one of the most surreal moments of my life as an Italian researcher, and I am pretty confident that the audience shared the same feelings, swinging from amusement, embarrassment, mirth and desperation, in a royally schizophrenic up-and-down state of mind.

We were told that the brain drain is an obsolete concept and that now they would like to find more flexible formulas to fund research projects and collaborations with Italian scientists abroad. We also understood that she understands the importance of basic research, but we miss the reason why then she decides to put the little money into applied research. What’s the point of having patents in a country like Italy that, unlike the US, totally lacks companies interested in investing in them? On the other hand, we tried to make her understand that the big difference between the US and Italy, beyond the consistent injection of money totally missing in Italy, stands in the intellectual freedom and continued support given to successful young investigators, in their more productive years. But what could we expect from someone who barely knew the difference between PhD students and postdocs and what it actually means to be a researcher? My masochism has been abundantly fed for this year.

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