Università degli Studi di Torino, Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Via S. Ottavio 50, 10124 Torino, Italy.
E-mail: massimiliano.vairae unito.it

Abstract

From the second half of 1996, Italian higher education system has undergone a wide and deep reforming process, aiming at innovate its curricular, as well as its organizational and governance structures.

This paper aims at offering an analytical description of the recent Italian higher education reform process from a new institutional perspective. It is structured in four main sections:

1. A brief description of the former governance and organizational structure of the Italian higher education system, as well as of the main attempts to change it during the decade 1980–1990 and of the modest and scanty outcomes of these first attempts;
2. The institutional genesis and embeddedness of reforming process, concerning its development dynamics, contents, vocabularies and orientation. At this level of analysis it is also possible to trace the political, cultural and social reasons at the basis of this process;
3. A brief description of the reform main features (goals, contents, structure, orientation) and of the changes it is expected to produce on governance structure, didactic and curricular organization, academic culture, and university productivity;
4. A first, although rather provisional, appraisal of the reform route so far. Positive aspects as well as contradictory ones will be pointed out. In particular, the latter are connected to the persistence of traditional cultural and cognitive schemata, used by Italian academics to interpret and redefine the reforming ideas and to structure courses of action fitted to those interpretations and definitions basically oriented toward the conservation of the institutionalised academy system features.