Concorsi: the charge-sheet
Many features of higher education in Italy attract expert and largely critical attention: the consequences of the reforms of the 1990s to give universities more autonomy; the impact on curricula of the implementation of the Bologna Process; the stubbornly high student drop-out rate; and the lack of serious evaluation of staff and institutional performance in research or teaching. Only sporadic sociological attention has however been devoted to the study of academic disciplines and the mechanism of their reproduction – the process of evaluating, appointing and promoting staff by public competition (concorso). With few exceptions the discussions of concorsi have dealt in anecdote and polemic, mostly produced by journalists, politicians, and of course academics themselves.Footnote 1 Their accounts are animated by a stock cast of characters: power-mad professors (baroni), supine selection committees, undeserving internal candidates, true scholars driven into exile. That cast’s performances attract severe criticism. From the creation of the national education system onwards the results of concorsi have allegedly been fixed in advance by senior members of the professoriat who have invariably rated the loyalty of local acolytes above the scholarly merits of outsiders. Compare “People are accustomed to the idea that to obtain a chair it is enough to frequent the professors and secure their benevolence” (1876) with “The mandarins (baroni) rule in Italy’s universities, men used to treating the academy as their personal plaything, to valuing loyalty over freedom, to preferring a mediocre local candidate to an excellent external candidate” (2009).Footnote 2 The pervasiveness of such apparently longstanding anti-meritocratic practices is commonly regarded as proven, first, by the inferiority of the publication profiles of many successful candidates to those of their unsuccessful competitors and, second, by the overwhelming preponderance of internal candidates among the winners, assumed to produce deleterious local inbreeding at the expense of international academic quality. Yet, perhaps just because the outcomes of concorsi are so widely regarded as foregone conclusions, the actual mechanisms of the selection process have not been thought worth close scrutiny.
Some charges can be admitted at once. Discussions among senior professors about candidates and the composition of selection committees certainly take place before each concorso, sometimes collectively rather than in private hugger-mugger, and are understood by participants as a duty to ensure merit is rewarded rather than a conspiracy simply to favour loyal followers (Romanelli Reference Romanelli2000, pp. 3-4). Equally certainly, internal candidates are overwhelmingly successful. Yet the equation of internal candidates and mediocrity is more a prejudice than a proven relation, alongside the suggestion that low staff mobility must reduce the quality of the system. Internal candidates are of course external candidates elsewhere so it is mere sleight-of-polemical-hand to pretend that they can be simultaneously undeserving mediocrities and superior talents according to the university to which they apply. We should note, too, that lack of staff mobility has been characteristic of those systems usually perceived in Italy as more meritocratic.Footnote 3 Other charges look weaker. Exclusive reliance on the comparison of publication records to demonstrate corruption ignores all the other dimensions of performance which are usually given weight in meritocratic selection procedures. Again, in the European Research Council Starting Grants for young university staff, Italians trained in Italy and working either at home or abroad accounted for between 10 % and 13 % of winners each year between 2007 and 2010, a respectable outcome in a competition involving 27 countries and hardly evidence for the claim that concorsi produce mediocre academics who then prefer to appoint equally mediocre young researchers as their eventual successors. If we did want to find support for that charge, we might do better to look for it in the absence of concorsi rather than their corrupt workings. In 1973 and 1980, for example, to cope with the large increase in student numbers after the liberalisation of 1969, some 25,000 casual and contract staff were swept into tenured positions by laws 766/1973 and 382/1980 without any serious evaluation of their qualifications or performance. Thanks to the very limited number of concorsi between 1985 and 2000 those assorted staff have been a significant force in Italian universities until their recent retirements.
Against the blanket denunciation of concorsi as invariable occasions of corruption – “the perversion of institutions and procedures from the purpose for which they were originally designed and ostensibly maintained… and the filling of positions by kin, clients and friends without regard for suitability or merit” – stands some recent evidence which suggests the need to make distinctions between disciplines and periods.Footnote 4 Allesina (Reference Allesina2011), using the concentration of surnames in disciplines and departments as a proxy for nepotism, finds particular tolerance for this practice in one-third of Italy’s disciplinary groupings (notably engineering, law and medicine) but very much less in the others. Likewise Durante, Labartino and Perotti (Reference Durante, Labartino and Perotti2011, pp. 6-9) assert that changes made to the rules governing concorsi in 1998 had significant effects on the relations between members of selection committees and thus on the ways in which their decisions were arrived at. Refining the analysis of concorsi by discipline and period therefore seems an essential step in producing a more realistic picture of their workings. It may also help us to find the elusive explanation for the conduct too easily labelled “corrupt”. Should it be ascribed to poor institutional design so that, as legislators seem to have unavailingly believed for a century and a half, creating better rules will produce more meritocratic outcomes? Is it just inevitable that where, as in Italy, power is based as much on complicity as on trust, corruption should emerge in all institutional settings – politics, the health system, the football stadium? Is it the academy’s mode of response to the restricted opportunities for intragenerational mobility and especially advancement based on merit which, Cobalti and Schizzerotto (Reference Cobalti and Schizzerotto1994, p. 226) suggest, characterise all Italian labour markets? Or is it simply driven by the profit motive? In the case of medicine, occupying senior academic positions or filling them with allies can be very lucrative – but comparative literature, philosophy, canon law …?Footnote 5
In tackling such issues I shall follow the route taken by Regini and his colleagues in their use of comparison to improve our knowledge of Italy’s higher education system (Regini 2009; Moscati, Regini and Rostan Reference Moscati, Regini and Rostan2010). But rather than repeat the customary search for signs of Italian deviance from a pure, sometimes purely imaginary, meritocratic model believed to characterise societies north of the Alps or across the Atlantic, I shall experiment with a comparison drawn from outside the world of formal education altogether. The reason is partly force majeure: I do not know of any ethnographically-informed analysis of the processes of appointment to universities elsewhere in Europe or North America. Partly, too, the recourse to a literally far-fetched comparator is intended to underline the contrast between the Italian concorso and what we perhaps imagine as the standard Euro-American way to recruit staff to universities – through a process designed to select the single candidate who best meets the requirements for a specific position as assessed by a committee dominated by members of the institution making the appointment and guided by relevant expertise. But mainly it is because the understanding of the conduct on display in concorsi requires a grasp both of the formal rules of the contest and of the substantive features of the particular academic community which has to apply them. Taking account of both those dimensions makes it more difficult to see concorsi simply as mechanisms of predictably sub-optimal recruitment achieved through self-interested arrangements between cliques of academic mandarins. Instead, I hope that it will encourage us to see how the conduct branded as “corrupt” can be shaped by the efforts to see that merit is rewarded in the context of rules that might have been designed to entrench the likelihood that it will not be. To bring the comparison into focus I shall begin with two snapshots, the first to illustrate some underemphasised elements in concorsi, the second to provide some guidance in interpreting them.
Snapshot 1 – An Italian Concorso
In May 1949 the five-member selection committee to appoint a professor of Greek literature at the University of Padua convened in the Ministry of Education in Rome. After preliminary discussion, a disagreement about the quality of one of the candidates flared up. Shouting insults, the chair of the committee, the illustrious 64-year old philologist Giorgio Pasquali, tried to punch another member (the younger, less illustrious Gennaro Perrotta, his brother-in-law and former pupil). Perrotta responded in kind, putting Pasquali to flight down the Ministerial corridors. Keen to extricate themselves from a potential bloodbath, two committee members resigned, claiming belatedly that the affinal relationship between the two combatants meant that the committee had always been improperly constituted. Replacements were hard to find. A year passed before the committee could reconvene, with Pasquali and Perrotta still in place, and more peaceful discussions resumed. However a further surprise was in store. Pasquali had three preferred candidates for the three winning positions which the rules for selecting full professors then allowed (a key feature of concorsi to which I shall return). He secured unanimous agreement on his first candidate and a three to two majority in favour of his second. At that point the victory of his third candidate, who had already received glowing evaluations in writing from two other members, seemed certain. But it wasn't. One of the apparently supportive triumvirate did not vote for him, having devoted most of his extravagant praise to a work which he well knew had been published too late to be formally taken into consideration by the committee. No candidate could therefore gain the necessary majority. The classicist to whom we owe the revisiting of this concorso suggests two reasons for the volte-face: first, the desire to prevent the Chair’s taking credit for imposing all three winners; and, second, the impact on the committee of the bitter conflict, then very recent, between supporters and opponents of Fascism: the controversial third candidate’s past as a partisan was too much for some committee members to stomach (Canfora Reference Canfora2005). The stalemate could not be resolved so only two rather than the possible three winners could be declared.
Dramatic confrontations, self-protective resignations, artful exploitation of the rules, flaunting of patronage, fall-out from war-time conflicts, readiness to forfeit a position in order to sabotage a colleague’s plans, a last-minute about-face: that volatile combination of ingredients evokes the messy world of the Sopranos rather than the friction-free operation of a spoils-system managed by the Masters of the Academic Universe. If we take account of the occasional participant-observer descriptions of concorsi, the sense of unpredictability becomes stronger still. From the perspective of a selection committee member in the field of sociology, David Nelkin underlines the considerable element of unpredictability in outcomes; and he describes the prolonged uncertainty created by the change of mind of a single member in the course of a 12-year-long concorso (2009, p. 267; pp. 268-271). Daniele Checchi, analysing the selection of an associate professor in economics, shows that the interview performance of the candidates was significant in determining the outcome – hardly a feature which is easily controlled or predicted (Checchi Reference Checchi1999, p. 22). From the candidate side in the field of comparative literature, Nicola Gardini reveals that despite his reluctance to cultivate the favours of the powerful he emerged as a winner in two of the four concorsi he entered (Gardini Reference Gardini2009). The frequency of such examples should caution us against simply dismissing them as insignificant exceptions to an otherwise invariant practice of high-level agreements negotiated in advance of the concorso and then smoothly implemented. Predictability is at best only half the story and may assume a different meaning once we insert it into the overall framework of uncertainties that govern the appointments process. Those uncertainties are built into concorsi by the rules themselves, by the ways in which the selection committees are constituted, by the rhythms of the evaluation process and by the hiatus between proclamation as a winner and appointment to a particular department. That participants are well aware of these uncertainties naturally stimulates their efforts to reduce them, some more successful than others, thus ensuring that their outcomes can variously illustrate both predictability and unpredictability.
Snapshot 2 – A cockfight in Bali
In April 1958 a public but formally illegal cockfight took place in the Balinese village where the anthropologist Clifford Geertz was studying. Unusually, the police arrived to stop it so Geertz joined the villagers in a panicked flight, instantly granting him the social acceptance that he had hitherto been denied and alerting him to the wider social and cultural understanding to be derived from studying this particular local activity. Briefly, cockfights are contests built around gambling in which the owners of cocks, backed financially by kin and allies, pit their birds against each other in brief but lethal combat. Champion cocks, owned by members of the local élite, are matched against birds of similar pedigree, under rules designed to ensure equality and thus to produce contests sufficiently unpredictable to be worth betting on. Lesser lights get lesser fights; and neither low-status men nor women play any part in the proceedings. The cockfight is thus a mechanism for regulating relations between local groups, emphasising social distinctions, and demonstrating the bravura of the victorious cocks’ owners. Cocks are deeply ambivalent symbols. They represent the acme of their owner’s masculinity; but they also embody the animality which the Balinese find repugnant and seek to repress in all its forms. Cockfights therefore generate passionate involvement, not only because of the challenge to cock-owners’ reputations but also through the friction from the juxtaposition of opposed principles: the contrasting Powers of Human Perfection and Animal Darkness.
The Balinese compare all significant contests – court trials, wars, political competitions, inheritance disputes and street arguments – to cockfights. If they knew of the concorso, they would probably not hesitate to add it to that list, just as Italian participants in concorsi would surely find one of the cockfight’s central features wholly familiar. “The selectors [in concorsi] are not chosen to evaluate the candidates but as the personal champions of individual candidates” (Simone Reference Simone2000, p. 66: italics in original). Both types of contest simultaneously engage both the sponsors and their competing protégés. And even if the concorso, pace the best efforts of Pasquali and Perrotta, is not quite “a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence and death” as Geertz describes the cockfight (2005, p. 62), the comparison of their structure of competition will reveal some of the deep play equally involved in reproducing Italy’s academic communities.
Why compare cockfights and Concorsi?
Similarities
Pragmatically, the cockfight in its Balinese form offers several parallels to the concorso, making it less an arbitrary choice of mirror than a useful lens to bring into focus features of organisation and substance which we might otherwise miss. Accusations of corruption and the not infrequent interventions of police, magistrates or administrative tribunals to scrutinise, overturn or punish the decisions of selection committees put concorsi in an analogous position to the cockfight – vital to the concerns of the community involved yet exposed to surveillance and intervention by outsiders. Once organised, like the cockfight, the concorso is a public event. Anyone is entitled to attend the encounters between candidates and committee, but in practice no one except occasionally the rival candidates take advantage of this right. Discussions are not protected by rules of confidentiality; and all evaluations, individual and collective, of single candidates by selection committee members have subsequently to be made public. Information and misinformation on selectors’ opinions are therefore routinely circulated in real time; and mobile phones enable outsiders to monitor promises of support, stiffen the spines of waverers, warn off opponents, indeed to try to influence decisions almost as they are being made. Issuing and repelling challenges to power and reputation are as much on display in committee meeting-rooms as in Balinese village squares.
Although ostensibly cockfights are organised around gambling, Geertz insists that they are fundamentally a dramatisation of status concerns (2005, p. 74). Material considerations are nonetheless far from unimportant. Cockfights are mostly sponsored by groups of merchants from neighbouring villages from which almost all participants come; the money circulated through betting is an important supplement to the rotating markets which underpin the local economy. Academic selection has a significant material dimension too: an economist has calculated that the cost of all concorsi held between 1999 and 2002, for example, was equivalent to the entire public expenditure on university research over the same period (Jappelli Reference Jappelli2002). But, at the level of action, status considerations are paramount. Just as cockfights are sorted hierarchically into three categories according to the prestige of owners and the size of the bets, so too concorsi are triple-tiered according to the level of appointment (full professor, associate professor, ricercatore), each tier having different procedures, different selection committee composition and different tasks for candidates.Footnote 6 All, however, display the principle that status superiors assess status inferiors. No one can apply for a position in a different university at his or her existing level; career movement via concorsi can only be upwards; and the gatekeepers of upward movement consist exclusively of people already at the higher level.Footnote 7 The repugnance felt at the idea of exposure to judgement by a status inferior is as deep in the strongly hierarchical Italian university as in any Balinese village. Indeed, status concerns tend to dominate the perceptions of participants and spectators. As in cockfights, where the outcome does not change the status of the owners, only of their cocks (Geertz Reference Geertz2005, p. 72; pp. 77-79), professors experience only an evanescent sense of triumph or shame with no lasting gain or loss – they remain professors – but, as described below, what their protégés gain directly from success in a concorso for full or associate professors is enhancement of status, not the immediate achievement of a higher position.
Finally, the passionate intensity which colours both contests is generated in part by the juxtaposition in concentrated form of opposing principles. Cockfights fuse humanity and bestiality, the peaks of culture and the troughs of nature; the rule-governed decorum of avoidance of open conflict between people frames the murderous intensity of the contest itself, encapsulating the emotional underpinning of the status order which regulates Bali’s social life. Likewise the concorso presents a contest between the claims of patronage and the recognition of merit; candidates embody both the reputations of their sponsors and the scholarly merits of their own achievements so that both loyalty and expertise are simultaneously put to the test. In a sense it too can be represented as an encounter between nature and culture, since the relations of patronage are taken to be more natural than the artificial and frequently modified rules of meritocratic impartiality. Such collisions, fuelled by material considerations and social distinctions, are of course likely to produce volatile and unpredictable encounters which are best held in check not just by the formal rules but by informal negotiations among interested parties.
Differences
Cockfights can hardly be a model for concorsi in every respect, however well they capture some fundamental elements in status competitions. In the first place, although since the Dutch invasion of 1908 cockfights involve fewer owners, no longer serve to generate tax revenue and have retreated into the shadows of public life, their rules, transmitted in writing, have not changed (Geertz Reference Geertz2005, p. 64). The regulation of concorsi, on the other hand, has been the object of constant legislative tinkering. Between 1865 and 2010 – when the most recent revisions were made – the rules have been modified and then modified again at almost every point. Who is entitled to compete, which categories of staff can serve on which levels of selection committee, how the members of those committees are chosen, what methods must be used to rank candidates, how many winners the committee can declare, how long the evaluation can take – all those major features and a host of minor ones have been regularly altered (Moretti and Porciani Reference Moretti and Porciani1997; Palermo Reference Palermo2010). The aim, never felt to have been adequately achieved, has been to neutralise both of the perceived opposing threats to impartial selection processes: if the senior members of the discipline are given power to determine appointments at the national level, they will use it to promote their own favourites and ignore local interests; if universities are left to determine their own appointments, they will favour local mediocrities and disregard scholarly merit. Over time, the balance between the relative weight given to national and local institutions – the Ministry of Education, the disciplinary community, individual universities – to determine decisions has thus been struck in favour first of one side, then another.
In the second place, the criteria for success are more elastic in academic selection processes than in cockfights. Cockfights are unambiguous. There are two rounds, and the bird which strikes the blow ending the first has to finish off its rival, or at least survive its own wounds for an instant longer, in the second. If the two birds expire more or less simultaneously, the order of their deaths is determined by an umpire whose decision is never contested. Ambiguity about the criteria for deciding the winner and doubt about whether they have been applied impartially have no place in the drama. The concorso is different. Since there is no route for internal promotion in Italian universities, each concorso must serve two functions: appointing to new positions and rewarding existing staff. Every move upward even within a department has therefore to be made through success in an open national competition in which the competition is not restricted to fellow-members of the department or faculty. This form of hyper-meritocracy puts under strain any unambiguous definition and recognition of “merit”. Combining into a single form the competitions kept separate in Anglo-American universities and governed by different rules renders it particularly difficult to make consistent use of a single set of criteria in comparing candidates. Moreover, since promotion can only come through national concorsi, it is hardly surprising that the overwhelming majority of their winners are candidates seeking advancement in their own universities rather than movement to others. This outcome, widely taken to be as a self-evident sign of “corruption”, is a predictable consequence of the double function of concorsi and has no direct bearing on the issue of whether mediocrity always trumps merit.
Thirdly, the meaning of victory is not equally straightforward in the two contests. The owner of the victorious cock immediately reaps the material and reputational reward of his triumph; but success in a concorso is only the first, and not necessarily definitive, stage in the appointment process. Victory means gaining the status of “appointable” (idoneo), not appointment to a particular position. Until 1998 the number of winners declared by a selection committee matched the number of advertised positions; and winners were guaranteed appointment. Since 1998, however, the direct link between concorso success and academic appointment has been severed. Each selection committee can now declare up to two winners at full and associate professor level (three between 1999 and 2001) and a single winner in the case of ricercatori. The university advertising the position must then appoint the successful ricercatore but, in the case of full or associate professors, can choose to appoint one or neither of the winners. The appointables who are not chosen can then be appointed by any other university within three years; thereafter they forfeit their status and must undergo a new concorso to recover it. This feature has injected significant uncertainty into the entire process, since the faculties now required to make appointments from among the winners proclaimed by selection committees are subject to other pressures – internal, external and financial – which determine whether and when the decisions of selection committees are acted on.
What has illuminated cockfight conduct, and what the accounts of concorsi have lacked, is the embedding of the contests in the life of the community that stages them. How the participants relate to one another in alliance or opposition, what ties are activated by the choice of venue for the contest, how the rhythms of the occasion help to support the meanings that people find in the action – these are the ingredients which provided Geertz with an answer to a favourite opening question: what is really going on here? Similarly, understanding concorsi requires us to place them in the setting of the specific discipline which they are employed to renew.
Anthropology, Italian style
Established securely in universities only since 1949, anthropology today counts 183 members, greatly outnumbered by their academic neighbours in contemporary history with nearly five hundred members and philosophy and sociology with more than one thousand each. Those anthropologists are dispersed across 46 universities and across faculties, departments and programmes within them. Only four universities employ more than ten anthropologists; most have fewer than five. Institutionally, therefore, the discipline has come to occupy a set of dispersed intellectual outposts, defended by scholars whose professional identities as anthropologists are rarely well understood by their neighbours. Although their numbers have increased by about 10 % since 2001, that growth has been outstripped by the expansion in the number of courses in anthropology, introduced into a widening range of new programmes at undergraduate and especially at masters level.Footnote 8 The greater teaching demands have also been met by peripatetic short-term contract staff, mostly trained in the few large centres with doctoral programmes, who can acquire classroom experience while they wait for the chance to enter the ranks of the ricercatori.Footnote 9The flow of information on demand and supply around a network of colleagues ensures that the anthropologists in small universities can find the extra teachers they need and their colleagues in the largest departments can organise the first steps in a professional career for their best students. Disciplinary consolidation and individual careers therefore require cooperative relations between anthropologists in different universities.
For most of the discipline’s short history its senior anthropologists have been identified with one of three loose groupings with separate institutional bases and intellectual traditions: the Demos, the Ethnos and the Anthros.Footnote 10 Since 1975 those hitherto independent groups responsible for their own recruitment have been yoked together with equal status in the field’s official designation: discipline demoetnoantropologiche. The Demos (demologi) are largely concerned with popular culture and folklore; their ancestry can be traced back to the pioneers of anthropology in and of Italy in the later 19th century. The Ethnos (etnologi) are a now almost extinct group of specialists in regional history, especially in West African and Central American societies, who have been absorbed into the other groupings over the past twenty years. The Anthros (antropologi culturali) are oriented in particular towards Anglophone and Francophone writing and research and are likely to have acquired fieldwork experience in one of the long-term research projects sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Africa or Central-South America. Demos and Anthros, numerically now evenly balanced, regard each other warily. The Demos see themselves as the intellectual expounders of local traditions, embedded champions of vulnerable cultural identities; they see the Anthros (“esterofili”) as consumers of ideas produced elsewhere. The Anthros regard the Demos (“autarchici”) as bearers of a once flourishing but now waning national tradition; they see the future of anthropology as participation in the contemporary global discipline. Given their intellectual interests, the Demos are by nature sedentary, their lives and works rooted in local society and its cultural institutions; they have few professional incentives to change their places of work. The Anthros, especially the younger members, are more mobile – cosmopolitans rather than locals. The discipline therefore contains members from distinct academic lineages who understand the objectives of anthropology in very different ways but who are nonetheless constrained by its ministerial classification as a single intellectual field to cooperate in recruiting their successors.
Those divisions are not held in check institutionally or intellectually by a single professional body or by the reciprocal scrutiny of peer-review or by training based on exposure to an acknowledged canon of classic works by Italian anthropologists. None of the three associations established between 1990 and 2007 (aisea, simbdea, anuac) has the mandate or authority to bring Demos and Anthros together to represent the field jointly to outsiders. The professional journals are few, usually short-lived and mostly local, like the array of small publishing houses, controlled by one or other group and stocked with contributions solicited from its own members rather than submitted for review. This fragmented array of publishing outlets hosts the overwhelming majority of Italian contributions to anthropology. Concern to reach an international readership is limited: between 2004 and 2010 only twenty-five anthropologists, 13 % of the total, contributed to the thirty principal US, French and English journals; five of those twenty-five were responsible for one-third of the contributions.Footnote 11 So interpretations of concorsi which rely principally on the statistics of articles in international peer-reviewed journals will capture only a very small part of the publishing reality, quantitative and qualitative, of anthropologists. The resulting dispersal means that little detailed knowledge of the works or qualities of fellow-anthropologists, especially from the opposite camp, can be presumed since there are no compelling reasons or occasions for familiarising oneself with writings in alien styles. Without much of a common cultural or institutional infrastructure and with none of the kinship-based dynasties which have a significant influence in some other disciplines (Allesina 2001: table 1, p. 3; Durante, Labartino and Perotti Reference Durante, Labartino and Perotti2011), what holds the groupings themselves together are the hierarchical linkages, intellectual and personal, between senior staff, junior colleagues and their most promising students.
In the absence of other forms of disciplinary aggregation concorsi therefore serve as the mechanism for regulating coexistence between the two major groupings, providing the occasions to respect or challenge the equal status of different types of anthropological knowledge. Inevitably, their outcomes are invested with much more symbolic and emotional weight than the humdrum appointment of a lecturer or associate professor to a remote academic outpost might seem to warrant. The normal intensity of that competition has been heightened in recent years by the determination of retiring senior anthropologists to ensure the preservation of their distinctive intellectual legacies by the appointment of sympathetic successors.
Concorsi in anthropology 1998-2010 Footnote 12
Until 1998 faculties had to request the ministry to advertise positions and the ministry then waited to receive a sufficiently large number of requests before launching national competitions. Concorsi were thus infrequent and the opportunities for entry and promotion correspondingly limited. In 1998, however, universities were given greater – but not complete – control over their own recruitment, along with the incentive to create many new positions to staff the Bologna Process-driven establishment of new courses and programmes. In anthropology, in the quarter of a century between 1976 and 1999 there had been just five opportunities for promotion to full professor and similarly rare opportunities at lower levels. In the ten years after 1998, 17 concorsi for full professors took place, alongside 27 for associate professors and 86 for ricercatori. Those 130 competitions produced 183 winners: 86 new entrants as ricercatori and 97 promotions. Allowing for double promotions and retirements, roughly two-thirds of those already in the profession in 1998 were promoted at least once over the following decade. If we add the unsuccessful candidates, the staff who filled the 455 positions on the selection committees and the colleagues who elected them to those positions, then we can see that the concorsi came to mobilise almost every member of the discipline in one role or another. Anthropologists and their sub-groupings have thus become as closely bound together by concorsi as Balinese villagers are mobilised in alliance or opposition by cockfights. Although academic selection processes dramatise the distinctions between social groupings less regularly than the cockfights which take place every 2-3 days, the exploits of concorsi past, progress in concorsi present and expectations for concorsi future seem to many insiders to constitute the dominant topics of conversation in academic life just as talk about cockfights is obsessive among the Balinese (Simone Reference Simone2000, p. 14; p. 78; Geertz Reference Geertz2005, p. 61).
Tempi
Geertz describes how the dramatic shape of each cockfight – the slow-moving half-furtive build-up in which owners negotiate a match and arrange the main bet, followed by the short-lived eruption of manic violence when the birds fight – itself helps to dramatise not only the contrast between typical human and animal characteristics but also the rhythms which Balinese find in social life generally: “empty” moments when not much happens punctuated by “full” moments of intense activity. In some academic systems the form of the appointment process itself sustains the perception of the steady refinement of judgement in filling the post: the detailed specification of the position, the weeding-out of the applicants in a long, then a short, list of potential suitables, their observation in seminar and interview, the arrival at the committee decision and its accompanying justification. Conducted in a space created for impartial deliberation and protected by scholarly expertise and confidentiality, the tempo marks the informed progression towards the maximum possible consensus on the best available candidate.
The form of the Italian concorso, however, encourages a different set of perceptions. Each selection process moves through three phases: first, the assembling of the candidates and selection committee members; then an apparently action-free but actually busy interlude; and finally the deliberations of the committee and action on its decisions. A number of unpredictabilities mark each of those phases, along with the likelihood of discontinuities between them. The overall duration is specified for each phase but it can be considerably prolonged by ministerial fiat, administrative delays, committee resignations and legal challenges.Footnote 13 Between 1999 and 2010 the concorsi for full and associate professorships lasted for an average of 19 months between the advertisement of the position and the ratification of the selection committee’s decision, nearly twice as long as the concorsi for ricercatori which averaged 11 months. That lengthy duration meant that several concorsi were likely to be taking place concurrently, in contrast to the years before 1998 when concorsi had mostly been infrequent, discrete events, disconnected from the results of the preceding round which had taken place in the relatively distant past and carrying few consequences for the next round which would take place at an unknown point in the future. The overlapping of concorsi after 1998 allowed information about developments in each case to flow between their committees, encouraging efforts to support or forestall likely outcomes, rendering more unpredictable the fates of single candidates as their sponsors digested what they heard from their colleagues and tried to ensure a fair distribution of positions between the two different schools of anthropology. The result is a hard-to-dislodge sense, accurate or not, that the outcome of any particular concorso is less directly connected to evaluations by any specific committee than to the course of extra-committee discussions.
Candidates
Anyone whose expertise is likely to be recognised as anthropological can apply for any position advertised in the discipline, provided it is at a higher level than the post currently occupied, without regard for whatever preference for a specific area of expertise the department advertising the post may have expressed. Nonetheless, several filters, formal and informal, pare down the potential field of candidates. At the most general level, in anthropology as elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, recruitment is still exclusively national; non-Italians very rarely apply through the ordinary concorsi and foreign academics have mostly been recruited through special one-off procedures.Footnote 14 And, although largely irrelevant in practice, limits are also set on the number of concorsi that anyone can enter in a single year. Within that broad shaping of the market, various factors reduce the field in any single concorso still further.
Unless the position and programme are new, there will always be a local candidate aspiring to entry or promotion. Indeed no post is advertised at any level without association with a preferred candidate whose merit, however defined, has been recognised by the department and faculty. Senior staff produce their candidates for concorsi as senior Balinese villagers bring cocks to the ring.Footnote 15 So there are no neutral venues in which all candidates can enter on equal terms, unencumbered by their sponsors’ reputations, inevitably invested to some degree in how their candidates perform. Accordingly it is very rare to find more than one candidate from the university which has advertised the position. Competition among local candidates is as strongly discouraged as cockfights involving members of the same lineage (Geertz Reference Geertz2005, p. 75). When it does occur, it forces individual local patrons into invidious choices as to which of their protégés to support; it sparks conflict among those whose reputations are invested in the candidates; and it risks confusing outsiders on the selection committee as to whom the genuinely preferred local candidate is.
The greater responsiveness of junior staff to such pressures probably helps to explain an otherwise puzzling feature of the competitions: fewer candidates apply for junior positions than for senior posts. The majority of the full professorial positions in anthropology advertised between 1998 and 2008 attracted more than 10 candidates each; the posts for associate professors, between 6 and 10 candidates, and those for ricercatori, fewer than 5 candidates. This unequal distribution of competition at the extremes may be partly a consequence of the rule which allows a single winner in concorsi for ricercatori and two for associate and full professor positions. But it also reflects the impact of two further features. First, again counter-intuitively, the contest itself is far less demanding at the highest than at the lowest level. Alongside their single winner, the concorsi for ricercatori involve a potentially daunting combination of written and oral tests. Full professors, however, are appointed solely on the basis of a sample of their publications and a curriculum vitae. The candidates for the highest positions never meet the selection committee face-to-face and committee members cannot therefore subject them to questioning, modify their assessments or make comparisons based on individual answers to standard questions. Judgements have to rely exclusively on documentary evidence and are likely to be swayed informally by the committee members who do possess direct experience of the candidate’s qualities and career performance. Second, because concorsi for ricercatori produce only a single winner whom the university is compelled to appoint, the belief that the post is promised to someone is more likely to discourage applications than in the concorsi for associate and full professorships with their two winners and therefore more open outcomes. Likely candidates may simply be deterred from making an application; maximum pressure will be exerted on them not to enter the field and thus smooth the path of the preferred candidate.
Selectors
Selection committees are composed exclusively of academic anthropologists who, with one exception, are elected from among the entire academic community.Footnote 16 The exception is the member directly appointed by the faculty launching the concorso, if possible from among its own staff. The rules for the composition of selection committees therefore have two consequences. First, the university which has advertised the position has at most a token presence on the selection committee since the rules forbid any other local participant apart from that appointee. If for various reasons it has no one eligible for appointment – the case in almost half (44 %) of all concorsi in anthropology between 1999 and 2010 – it will have no direct representative at all, despite having to bear the long-term consequences of whatever decisions the committee makes.Footnote 17 Any department that wants to have a significant, and if possible decisive, say in its own appointments therefore has to take steps to try to ensure a selection committee at least receptive to its views and needs, if possible with a champion in the form of a senior figure likely to be nominated as chair by the other members. The level of participation in elections which reflects the active interest in guaranteeing support is therefore quite high. Between one-half and two-thirds of the members in each category usually turn out to vote; and because no contest is sociologically insignificant, senior staff participate as readily in elections to the committees to appoint ricercatori as they do in those to appoint professors. Senior figures can usually be persuaded to let it be known they are ready to serve and thus attract votes: eight (15 %) of the leading anthropologists took up almost half (46 %) of the positions available to full professors between 1999 and 2010. It is not too difficult to ensure the election of at least two members known to be on good terms with the member nominated by the faculty or sympathetic to the intellectual orientation of the department.Footnote 18 However, because each elector has only one vote, it is difficult to get more than a bare majority on any committee. A bare majority is an insecure one: as the Pasquali-Perrotta concorso shows, the shift of a single vote can destroy even the best-laid plans.
There is a second consequence of using elections rather than expertise as the mode of staffing selection committees. It guarantees that, except by coincidence, there will be no match between the specialist fields presented by the candidates, the expertise of the staff evaluating them and the specific academic needs of the university advertising the position. Just as a candidate with any expertise can apply for any position, so an anthropologist from any sub-field can be appointed to any selection committee. The committee is therefore not only likely to be unfamiliar with the qualities of the local candidate put forward for promotion but also to be poorly equipped to evaluate the publications of the candidates it is scrutinising. The difficulty is aggravated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the candidates’ publications have appeared in journals with no peer-review process and therefore without the imprimatur of approval by experts. The reserve expressed about the competence of selection committees in economics (where recruitment is carried out within the much more cohesive sub-fields of the discipline) – “it would not be unreasonable to entertain doubts on the ability of most members of the average commission to evaluate the scientific production of the best candidates and to put it in the context of the current literature” (Perotti Reference Perotti2002, p. 15) – would equally apply to anthropology, a discipline exceptionally hospitable to very different research interests. This conclusion says nothing about the intellectual quality of the assessors; it merely draws out the consequences of the rules for election to selection committees.
Without the cultural infrastructure of peer-review practices or any match between the expertise of the candidates and their evaluators, how can an applicant specialising in, say, Ghanaian politics plausibly be ranked against a scholar of saints’ cults in Southern Italy or a specialist in health services in Ethiopia when the committee members lack any expertise on West Africa, religious phenomena or health issues, let alone on all of them? Yet that comparison is what the rules, designed to ensure transparency and impartial assessment, require. They also make it very likely that assessments of the same candidates by different committees will vary greatly. Judgements, reached in complete good faith, can be radically different, subject to the dangers not just of a little learning but of no learning at all. How then can talent and scholarly achievement be protected under these circumstances? So potentially unpredictable an outcome, of which selectors and candidates alike are well aware, provides an obvious incentive for senior staff to hold discussions to try to ensure that the merits of their junior colleagues, unlikely to be known in any detail to the selection committee in front of which they appear, receive proper recognition.
Entr’acte
Once the identities of candidates and committee membership are known, a kind of “phoney war” ensues under cover of the formal pause in selection activity. On one hand, the candidates’ academic personae are fixed at the point when applications close since no publications or achievements after that date can be considered – a rule which, given the sometimes prolonged passage of time before the committee starts work, tends to penalise the prolific and successful.Footnote 19 On the other side, selectors are sounded out for their views on the candidates, their preferences revealed, hints dropped, promises made, debts called in. These consultations usually take place privately but sometimes – especially when several concorsi are scheduled to take place concurrently or in rapid succession – meetings of senior staff are called to share information and publicise the worth of particular candidates; a meeting of senior Anthros was held for this purpose prior to the concorsi launched in 2008. Sponsors can then share the results of those discussions with their protégés and assess whether it is worthwhile to persevere with applications. Participation is costly and no one wants to waste time and money if there is little chance of success. The suggestion that the post is already earmarked for someone can of course turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy as the other candidates withdraw and leave the field open for the alleged favourite. The formal list of applicants for the positions of associate professor and ricercatore(applicants for full professorships only need to send in their publications and CVs) is therefore likely to be substantially reduced by the time the process begins in earnest.Footnote 20
Actually existing evaluation
Time-and-motion studies of selection committee meetings would surely record that members expend their greatest efforts on ensuring documentary proof of compliance with procedural minutiae. The equal attention to every formality tends to eliminate any sense that successive phases become cumulatively and substantively more important in a collective advance towards the identification of the best candidates. The one marker of clear forward movement – the provision allowing exclusion of candidates on the basis of their publications and CVs before admission to the oral and written tests – is very rarely activated. Host universities strongly discourage its use since early exclusion is nearly certain to provoke appeals which will at least delay any appointment, can involve costly court action and may force the entire procedure to be restarted with a new committee.
Members read out their already prepared evaluations of each candidate, written in the knowledge that they must be made public and usually without any deep understanding of the candidate’s particular specialty. Since, in the cases of professorial positions, two winners assessed by identical criteria are to be declared and the selection committee is in any case not making a direct appointment to the advertised position, the evaluations can take no account of whatever substantive preferences have been indicated by the department responsible for the concorso. In most cases they can therefore amount to little more than résumés of CVs, sprinkled with the thin terminology of formal criteria (“originality”, “method” etc.) and lacking any thick description of the candidates’ substantive qualities. Small variations on formulaic phrases may be deployed to insert micro-distinctions on the track records and interview performance of candidates but few are sufficiently unequivocal to constitute an irreversible judgement. Only the most extreme assessments are likely to provoke contestation; and since no refinement of members’ judgement through the exchange of motivated opinions takes place, the obligatory collective evaluation then becomes the lowest common denominator amalgam of the individual evaluations.Footnote 21Finally, since committees are not required to provide a justification for their choice of winners, no time is spent on attempting to define and make explicit the grounds for the evaluations and their outcome. Considerable uncertainty therefore exists until the final moments about how individual members will rank the candidates and how far senior members will risk compromising relations with their peers in support of their own candidates. Their views are in any case helped to prevail by the absence of any peer-review infrastructure for the publications presented by candidates, thus reducing the range of intellectual grounds on which to resist the power of status.
Outcomes
Since most concorsi are launched to promote a deserving staff member, it is no surprise that only 3 of the 44 concorsi for full and associate professorships ended without a local candidate among the winners.Footnote 22 To reject local candidates as inferior to outsiders is to ignore the recognition of their merit which they have already received from their colleagues. Such a rebuff threatens the relations of cooperation between the major groupings and sub-groupings across the discipline and risks reprisals at the next opportunity. It usually leads to the faculty’s refusal to employ either winner, which carries the penalty of not being able to readvertise the position for at least two years. One of the positions is therefore generally decided consensually: as in cockfights, when a local bird fights an outsider, villagers are expected to support the home contestant, regardless of the state of their relations with its owner (Geertz Reference Geertz2005, p. 75).
In the case of appointments of full and associate professors, it is the decision on the second winner which generates the most intense conflict between committee members. The range of criteria in play, activated in what is effectively an effort to compare the candidates’ cases for promotion in different universities, makes the achievement of consensus difficult: acknowledging local needs, rewarding long service, recognising merit, keeping the disciplinary peace, renouncing support for a candidate now on condition of receiving it in the future. Here is where the claims of patronage and impartiality clash most directly, and therefore where the unpredictable element in the outcomes usually lies. Those who do finally emerge as winners generally secure promotion in their home university.Footnote 23 Indeed, success in an external concorso, like victory in an away game, is regarded as especially meritorious, an even more convincing validation of quality than a home victory and thus to be considered a clear justification for local promotion.
If we consider entries to the profession rather than promotions within it, a more complex picture of academic mobility appears. Taking the 73 (85 %) of the 86 entrants between 1999 and 2010 on whom I have data, we can identify a spectrum of mobility in early intellectual careers. At one extreme, about one-quarter of the total are locals: those who completed their first degree, acquired any postgraduate qualifications and took up their first appointment all at the same university. They are considerably outnumbered by cosmopolitans, however. Almost two-fifths of all entrants had been maximally mobile, with their first degree, postgraduate qualification and first employment coming at different institutions. Two-thirds of the cosmopolitans had in fact completed their postgraduate training abroad in France or the UK. The remainder, somewhere between those extremes of sedentarism and nomadism, might be characterised as transhumants since they are frequently appointed to the university where they took their first degree after a period elsewhere acquiring a doctorate. If we include early, short-term, mobility in career profiles, then over their professional lifetimes Italian academics are more mobile, and more exposed to different intellectual styles and schools, than they are often portrayed.
Conclusion
Anthropology is one of Italy’s smallest and perhaps most variegated academic communities; and how far observations on its mode of reproduction apply to other disciplines – larger, less heterogeneous, but working under the same formal rules for recruitment – remains to be explored. What this narrow-focus scrutiny suggests is a way of interpreting concorso conduct that does not take self-interested corruption to be its single inspiration nor regards the outcome as simply the mechanical implementation of prior deals sealed between the mandarins of the profession. Because concorsi allow very wide entry to every competition and the rules make expert evaluation of the entrants very difficult, uncertainty must be a central feature of every contest. Under these circumstances it is only prudent for senior staff, aware that the careers of their deserving colleagues or protégés lie in the hands of committees poorly equipped to assess them, to hold prior informal consultations and to exert pressure to ensure that locally-recognised merit is rewarded at some point in the sequence of concorsi. At the same time, forced to collaborate in reproducing a community which encompasses different styles of anthropology, they need to ensure the continuing peaceful coexistence of those styles as a means for the protection, rather than the flouting, of academic merit.
Geertz interpreted the cockfight in Bali as a story that the Balinese tell about themselves, a tale that is disquieting insofar as it brings together contrasting value systems and reveals to participants and spectators the nature of life as it might be without the punctilio of social exchange and the avoidance of open conflict. It brings to the surface the dark side of a social and emotional order founded on status, projected onto the lethal battles between cocks. Concorsi generate an analogous collective disquiet, regularly confirmed by newspaper headlines, public polemics and constant modifications of procedures. They also generate unease among the participants themselves, conscious that they are confronted by the juxtaposition of meritocracy and patronage in a contest that allows neither the exclusion nor the rational regulation of either principle. Thirty years ago Geertz himself suggested that ethnographic attention should be devoted to comparing the thought-worlds and career patterns of different disciplines (Geertz Reference Geertz1982). He did not pursue that proposal. But to treat educational institutions as assemblies of loosely-connected practices with parallels to be found in unexpected places rather than as tightly integrated systems to be compared only with each other may encourage the illumination by ‘ingenious juxtaposition’ (1995, p. 49) that he made central to his own interpretive approach.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Ugo Fabietti and Maria Minicuci for extending my understanding of Italian academic selection processes and their disciplinary settings far beyond the limits of my participant observation in seven rounds of appointments between 2003 and 2010. They bear no responsibility for my choice of interpretive framework or for the use I have made of their invaluable help.
