Far-right medicine plans would ‘collapse’ Italian universities

Italy needs more doctors, but a proposal from far-right parties to push admissions exams to the end of the first year would be calamitous, according to a centre-left academic running against them.

Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, which has led voting intention polls since May, wants to replace national entry exams for medicine with a system of open entry for the first year of study, shifting selective exams to the start of the second year.

“The Italian universities do not have the capacity to take care of this intake of students,” Andrea Crisanti, a professor at Imperial College London and a candidate for the centre-left Democratic Party, told Times Higher Education.

“For each student that attends a faculty of medicine, there are at least five applications. To multiply the number of students by six will generate the collapse of the Italian universities,” said Professor Crisanti, who is standing in the Italian Senate’s foreign constituency, which represents Italian voters abroad, referring to the idea as “true demagoguery”.

Andrea Gavosto, the director of the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, an education thinktank, wrote in an analysis that the change would mean enrolling 50,000 extra students nationally. Accounting for additional teachers, lecturing and lab spaces, he costed the proposal at an extra €200 million (£174 million) per year.

Giliberto Capano, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Bologna, said the idea of deferring selection was being presented to voters as an end to the national cap on student numbers. “The way this is framed, on Twitter, on Facebook, in the public speeches, looks to the normal people like a proposal to completely abolish the numerus clausus,” he said, referring to the cap.

The Brothers of Italy also want to end the standardised length of degrees brought in by pan-European reforms under the Bologna Process. Changing from three-year bachelor’s and two-year master’s degrees would throw Italian universities out of sync with others on the continent and would likely be opposed by universities, Professor Capano said.

One issue on which the leading parties of the right and left seem aligned is a return to meritocracy in the selection of students and academics. The theme runs through the Brothers of Italy programme, and Professor Crisanti said the Italian system needed reform based on “transparency, accountability and selection on merit”.

“We need to compare the universities in competition against one another, to make sure that they select the most talented people, and those that don’t, we need to implement a system that punishes them,” he said.

Aside from raising standards in itself, a move towards meritocracy would make universities more attractive and accessible to researchers abroad, who, he said, are often excluded because of nepotism. “It’s not only impermeable to them, its impermeable to any other Italian that is not within that particular ring of connection,” he said.

Professor Crisanti, who has met with Italian diaspora academics during his campaign tour of Switzerland, France, Belgium and the UK, said current tax breaks for returnee researchers were not enough, and that a new system of research grants was needed.

Other Italian academics can take a somewhat sanguine position ahead of the 25 September election: whoever wins, the education sector is set to get more than €20 billion from the European Union’s Covid-19 recovery fund.

“Part of the public funding increase should come, by law, to hire more academics,” said Professor Capano. “The academic world is not so interested in what is going on in the debate because they think, ‘We will get some money for a few years; let’s allow them to say what they want.’”

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com