Italy: Corrupt Selection of Academic Staff

http://www.justresponse.net/Paris_1.html


A mathematical exposition of rigged 'concorsi'

Quirino Paris (left) adduces formal mathematical proof to illustrate the
rigging of teaching staff selection procedures, or concorsi, at Italian
universities

Abstract

Italian universities hire professors in a way that is entirely different
from the approach of other European and American universities. In Italy,
there are 77 universities. The law states that, when a university
announces a job opening in a given discipline, all the professors of
that discipline, regardless of their affiliation, must cast a secret
ballot to elect the members of the selection committee.

Over the years, powerful and scheming professors have used the electoral
process to fix the outcome of the hiring process. The scheme begins with
the identification of the individual who, according to these scheming
professors, should get the job.

Then comes the election of the selection committee. In order to match
the expectation of the scheming professors with the choice of the
selection committee, the members of this committee – elected by law
through a secret ballot – must obviously be pre-selected among
complacent collaborators and their name notified to all the voters.
Every voter receives the information for whom to vote via email, often
enclosed in an attachment facetiously called a "holy card." In every
election, a large majority of professors vote according to the received
instruction because they believe that rebelling against this rigged
system is hopeless and dangerous for their career and that of their
collaborators. Their only hope is to wait their own turn by offering
deference, loyalty and silence ("omertà" in Italian) to the group of
scheming professors.

It is fair and sad to say that, in Italian universities, mediocrity
rather than excellence is the final objective of selection committees in
a large majority of job openings. In this paper we analyze the election
of 27 selection committees in agricultural economics. Surprisingly, the
votes’ distribution is rather uniform among the elected members of all
the committees. This finding constitutes the fingerprint of the scheming
professors in the crime of fixing the hiring process.

Note: This article was first published by JUST Response on October 26
2005. Quirino Paris has been a professor of agricultural economics at
the University of California, Davis, since 1969. In 2004, he was proudly
expelled from SIDEA, the Italian society of agricultural economics. He
had denounced the colonizing activities of some scheming professors for
fixing the hiring process throughout Italy.