Programmatic statements made by Minister Giannini
on April 1, 2014, before the VII Permanent Commission of the Senate
Before concluding, I would like to spend a few words on the sector of Italian Academies and Conservatories. This is a sector that in recent years has been neglected by politics, especially at the ministerial level.
The effects of this drift, unfortunately, have not been long in coming. It is my precise intention to assign to the artistic training sector the role it deserves, renewing and reforming it also through the regulatory acts that will become necessary.
The AFAM galaxy is very diverse and articulated: there are more than 80,000 students in total; there are approximately 5,400 teachers. International mobility, promotional initiatives, and awards testify to a great vitality of some institutions, including private ones. But this vitality, unfortunately, does not correspond to adequate organizational functionality.
The approval of Article 19 of Law 128/2013, containing a series of urgent measures for recruitment and other financial interventions, was a first sign of a will to return to addressing this sector which brings so much prestige to our country, especially abroad, as it is linked to the worldwide fame of our artistic, musical, dramatic, and choreographic production.
Most of the requirements, including the reconstitution, in a significantly lightened form, of the National Council for Higher Artistic and Musical Education (CNAM), are nearing completion, in particular: the regulations for recruitment; the permanent placement of staff; the establishment of exhaustion rankings, so-called institutional ones; the distribution of funds to recognized musical institutes and "Abbado" awards.
It is, however, quite evident that these are punctual and isolated interventions that do not resolve the historical ills of this higher education sector.
The most serious issue is what could be defined as "incomplete autonomy." The AFAM sector, in fact, was the subject of a profound restructuring following the issuance of Law 508 of 1999.
Once the law was issued, other measures followed slowly that attempted to implement the autonomy rules. But the truth is that the failure to define implementing regulations caused a true progressive implosion of the sector.
Not only that. Recruitment has been blocked for fifteen years, resulting in an extremely high rate of precarious employment and consequent, inevitable, trade union tensions. The governance of the Institutes is simply chaotic: except for a few happy islands, the various bodies are in perennial conflict with each other: presidents and directors, academic councils, boards of directors, administrative directors. The consequence is a very high rate of internal conflict with very frequent government commissions.
To the autonomy that in principle should bring the AFAM model closer to the university model, there actually corresponds a strong centralization both in the distribution of resources and in the appointment of bodies and, along a transition that has lasted for more than a decade, in recruitment.
In the face of this situation, which now risks definitively collapsing this sector, I believe it is my precise responsibility to decisively declare the four pillars of simplification, planning, evaluation, and openness. In no other segment of MIUR's responsibility is a comprehensive and well-structured reform process so urgent.
First of all, the governance of the system must be profoundly revised, and the respective powers of the directing bodies and the management bodies must be defined and circumscribed, reviewing the relationship between teaching representation on one hand, and political leadership and administrative leadership on the other; experimentally, some statutes of real autonomy should be put in place, specifying requirements and powers to be included in the bodies and providing, by analogy with what happened in Universities, assembly bodies with powers of self-regulation.
Many Institutes, especially recognized ones, are in conditions close to closure and can no longer guarantee either utilities or essential teaching services; it is time to proceed with a rationalization of the system – which counts more than 135 entities – by merging some individual institutions in different territories in light of precise quantitative requirements.
The reorganization of the channels for permanent placement and qualification must then be addressed; the distribution of resources, in the AFAM world as well as for schools and Universities, should occur according to precise criteria that are correlated to the size and activities of the Institutes rather than simply according to historical criteria; it must be integrated
the construction fund which today is absolutely insufficient, especially if we consider that a good part of the buildings in the system are historical and prestigious.
Regarding evaluation, it appears appropriate to adopt rigorous evaluation criteria for existing institutions, providing precise rules for ex-ante accreditation and ex-post evaluation of study courses. Fixed parameters recognized even at an international level must be followed, with particular regard to the numerous private institutions requesting legal recognition.
Also regarding the distribution of state funding, it is necessary to introduce reward quotas, taking into account teaching effectiveness, the degree of internationalization, and research capacity.
Finally, an open system of Academies and Conservatories must contemplate forms of mobility that provide for the exchange of teaching experiences but also the entry of talents from abroad who bring significant research experience and creative capacity to our institutes. In this perspective, a first sign of transparency will be the construction of a dedicated website (which, in analogy with universitaly and researchitaly, we will call artitaly) in which all the identifying elements of the system are inserted.
