The speech that Virginia Magnaghi, Valeria Spacciante and Virginia Grossi gave on July 23 at the graduation ceremony at the Scuola Normale in Pisa was a breath of fresh air. With their words, the three recent graduates have brought an often overlooked topic into the public debate: the current state of the Italian university. Battered by insufficient public investments and cuts that have led to a gradual downsizing of the system, the university has seen a reduction in the number of students enrolled, particularly in the south; that of the teaching staff, increasingly precarious; that of the number of degree courses, increasingly with limited numbers; and that of the technical-administrative staff.
In the last twenty years it has been mainly students who have voiced the consequences of this downsizing, highlighting how it has gone hand in hand with a general increase in university fees, a reduction in scholarships and a reduction in employment expectations, already reduced before. pandemic due to a meager supply of skilled labor and deteriorated further in the past year. Gianfranco Viesti wrote about it in 2016 in an important report entitled University in decline. A report on Italian universities from north to south (Donzelli 2016), offering a harsh portrait of the state of the university in Italy. Furthermore, the 2020 Almalaurea report shows that the country has had two sad records for years: that of the lowest number of graduates in Europe, together with a brain drain among the highest (the few graduates who are leaving and this flight has increased by 41.8 per cent in the last eight years due to poor employment prospects and low wages).
Not only that: if we consider the graduates who choose to continue their studies, Italy is last in Europe, together with Greece. Girls and boys do not go to university because it costs too much and because with or without a degree there is no job market in Italy capable of absorbing them.
It is exciting, in such a difficult context, to hear the precision of the words of Virginia Magnaghi, Valeria Spacciante and Virginia Grossi, not only because the three recent graduates have managed to bring the eloquence of their voices into such a difficult context, but because they have opened an opening in public discourse, showing the implications of these policies for students. They did so, moreover, as young women, actively opposing the Italian university’s habit of penalizing women in a systematic way in every phase of their experience and academic career, a theme well highlighted in their speech, and on which there is still a lot of work to do. Their words went viral, attracting thanks and compliments, as well as some criticism. It must be said, however, that the recent graduates have raised urgent and for a long time absent from the Italian public debate, on which it is necessary to reflect.
Inequalities
We can rethink What are universities for? (Penguin 2012) by Stephen Collini and Henry Giroux’s work on the transformations of tertiary education in the last thirty years to realize how international literature has long dwelt on the social implications of the neoliberal university. Magnaghi, Spacciante and Grossi have used the term “neoliberal” to describe the contemporary university, and although this word is sometimes obscure, it has a very precise meaning, which refers to that process of reducing state intervention in public spending that in university has not only involved a process of divestment and cuts, but which has profoundly changed its structure and purpose.
In Italy, one of the consequences of these cuts has been the gradual increase in university fees and the introduction of the programmed number in more and more degree courses. If we take these two consequences as examples of the transformations underway, we would clearly see that they are profound transformations, with origins in the economic sphere and social and psychological consequences. As the Almalaurea report writes, “Italy ranks, together with Belgium, France, Spain and Ireland, among the European countries in which the share of students who pay university fees is very high and at the same time the share of those who receive a Scholarship”.
In these countries, the reduction in the number of scholarships affects access to tertiary studies and penalizes the most fragile social groups: girls and boys without means or disadvantages do not have the same opportunities as their richer peers. When recent graduates criticize the logic of competition and the “rhetoric of excellence”, they describe precisely this: the risk that divestment in the public university does not select the “best”, or the “excellent”, but simply the richest, increasing social inequalities instead of reducing them.
The culture of perfection
However, Magnaghi, Spacciante and Grossi also emphasize another theme – in turn present in the international debate and absent in Italy – and that is how much this competition has negative consequences on the psychological health of students. Foreign literature has stressed several times how the “culture of perfection” highlights the existence of a very fine line between the tendency tohyper achievement (the drive continues to compete) and the anguish of failure.
Sometimes the mere fact of failing an admission test or exam leads to the conclusion that you are a failure, rather than simply thinking that you have failed a goal, wrote Julie Scelfo in the New York Times. According to Scelfo, we can speak of a culture of perfection whenever the perception of having to excel in one’s activities translates into the experience of moods of “discouragement, alienation, anxiety or depression”.
In these cases the guilt translates into the feeling of being “at fault (defective) or, to put it another way, of not being good enough “. “It’s not about having made a bad performance”, continues Scelfo, “it’s about being good for nothing”.
It is sad, in this context, to observe that, in some cases, the words of the students have been met with criticism or with impatience. However harsh, they urge us to reflect collectively on the principles and aims of public education. The Marquis Nicolas de Condorcet wrote in his lucky Public Education Report of 1792 that education has two purposes: to reduce the cultural gap and the economic inequalities of society. In an unequal society like ours, access to knowledge is the only tool capable of giving everyone the opportunity to reduce inequalities and access a dignified life. In the university reforms of the last twenty years, the importance of education in combating inequality has rarely been mentioned. Thanks to Virginia Magnaghi, Valeria Spacciante and Virginia Grossi for reminding us of what education is for and in which direction we should work to change it.
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