Virginia Magnaghi (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa): "Being against merit means being against the worsening of inequalities" Good morning everyone. Thank you for this opportunity, for this invitation, for this space. I especially thank you for what you have done over these ten years, for the time you have dedicated to Roars and the commitment you have put in. Those, like me, who have experienced the university in the last 10 years, have relied on you and found a reservoir of critical thinking and fundamental data. Probably the reason I am here with you today is a speech I gave in Pisa a year and a half ago that had some media resonance; that speech relied heavily on the work you have done, and for this I thank you. So, perhaps, a first answer to the question at the center of this round table – what do the university and school deserve today? – is that they deserve more Roars: to the extent that they deserve more commitment, more willingness to look at themselves, to study themselves, to analyze themselves critically, to engage civically, without accepting the system we are in but trying to renegotiate it; without accepting the blackmail of productivity, without accepting to take refuge in discipline, but deciding to devote part of one's time to self-questioning. We need, for example, more tenured staff who try to question precariousness: we cannot leave precariousness to be dealt with only by the precarious. That speech in Pisa was a speech that came from an oasis of excellence. I want to emphasize that it was not a speech, to use two words that were used yesterday, of "wounded winners." Clearly, this is an expression that can arise in a system like the American one. We were interested in questioning the contradictions we felt. The perspective was that meritocracy is a trap: certainly not for the wounded winners, but for the supposed losers or, above all, for those who cannot even afford to compete, to enter this competition. An analysis of meritocracy cannot exist without a more general contextualization of university policies, as we have said in these couple of days: if you want to frankly discuss meritocracy, then the two aspects cannot be separated. Probably, however, that speech also made noise because it came "from within": excellence was being criticized from the inside. Since then, the voices of students – as is clear also from those who spoke before me today – are questioning this issue a lot, also intercepting needs that do not concern only the university, but look beyond the classrooms: this is also demonstrated by Emma Ruzzon's latest speech in Padua (and all this is also happening in other universities). In other words, there is questioning about what excellence is in the context of a drastic cut in funding and a questionable use of the funding that exists – as we said this morning. I believe that another thing we deserve and that the university and school deserve is a more frank discussion about the objective conditions. As those who spoke before me have also shown, it is increasingly difficult today to guarantee the basics of the right to study. Students who would be entitled to a scholarship do not have it or see it arrive with enormous delays; there are not enough accommodation places; school dropout rates are very high and the number of graduates is low. That is, again to talk about numbers that were mentioned yesterday, the problem, clearly, is not that there are 900 students in the economics course, but that there are three teachers: the number, the ratio between teachers and students, does not work. And above all, it does not work in this context. You cannot talk about meritocracy while forgetting these starting data. I believe that a more frank discussion about merit must start from a very simple consideration: being against merit today simply means being against the worsening of inequalities. Today's system seems to tell us that excellence, meritocracy, are the only parameters that make society work and prosper: and this not because the "system of excellence" is the only one that really works in itself, but because it is the only one being funded. In this regard, I would like to share a series of data to start from, concerning perhaps the embodiment of excellence in today's university system – that is, the system of schools of excellence, the system of merit schools. The first obvious fact is the proliferation of these schools in Italy: today there are 53, which means there are 53 residences that in some way guarantee accommodation and, to varying degrees, university fees and board for 4,000 deserving students. We are talking about 4,000 students per year starting from 2012, the year in which the first legislative decree intervened on the principles regarding the right to study by regulating the existence of merit schools. Since then, all these structures have been accredited and each university has aimed to create its own merit center, its own "for the few" center. The data, which moreover are presented by the Conference of Merit Colleges (so from the inside: they are not data from an external company) actually confirm that excellence only exacerbates inequalities. I'll give you some: two thirds of the colleges are in the North, one third between the Center and the South. Within these schools, that is among these 4,000 students, 57.5% are male, when in the Italian university context we know well that there are many more women (males are only 40% of all university students). The data that strikes me the most, that I find most interesting, is that cumulatively, in the decade between 2009 and 2019 – these are public data available online, studied by this consulting company called "The European House" – the merit colleges invested 43 million euros in structural interventions, technologies, residences and housing. In the same decade, 43 million euros is 60% of what the Ministry invested in infrastructure and technology for the entire system. When we talk about merit schools, we are talking about 4,000 students compared to a system of one million and 800 thousand enrolled. So, a system that deals with 0.22% of all Italian students has financed the structures of these students with an amount equal to 60% of what was spent for everyone. In the context we started from, therefore in the context of those objective conditions we mentioned, focusing on excellence means making a model of this kind prosper. And making this model prosper inevitably means wanting inequalities to worsen. In the face of these numbers, excellence appears as a regressive tool and as a conservative tool that, at the same time, is both the product and justification of the drastic reduction of funding on the one hand and the concentration of funding on the other. It is clear, then, that one should not be surprised if six days ago "Repubblica" reported that the University of the South could close by 2040, threatened by demographic decline and internal emigration; at the same time, it should not be surprising that the same article, as a solution to the problem, proposed the opening of centers of excellence in the South. I would like to conclude simply by trying to say that, in my opinion, reasoning about excellence leads us to look in two directions. On the one hand, it leads us to look outside: we must not look at the rhetoric of excellence only by stopping at the schools of excellence and not even by stopping at the thresholds of the entire university; instead, we must go outside the university. The dynamics of standardization and rationalization through the market of people do not only affect the university: they affect the school, as we saw yesterday, but also, for example, healthcare. On the one hand, therefore, a reflection on excellence pushes us to question excellence as a cross-cutting dynamic. On the other hand, perhaps, it also pushes us to look inside ourselves with a different perspective. For example, it pushes us to intercept the fact that, in light of the same standardization and in light of the same rationalization, there are other dynamics on which the university rests and which it tends to hide; for example, it is built on the precariousness of people and the flexibility of work. These increasingly rooted dynamics are inserted in a system in which, fundamentally, everything is a service, and in which teaching is only the first in a much longer series of services. Perhaps, it is the "highest" service, because it is the service provided by professors and teachers, and it is the culturally elevated one; however, many other services are at stake, which inevitably end up becoming second-class, and which are services that over time have become increasingly precarious, flexible, "rational" and even invisible. And these latter services take place in the classrooms of our universities, the same ones where we attend courses: they are cleaning, porter, porterage, and cafeteria services. When we talk about the right to study – when we talk about cafeterias, residences, clean classrooms – we must also talk about these services, which end up being second-class services, equally or even more precarious, in a university where teaching has now become just another service, for now still first-class. These dynamics we are talking about are cross-cutting: the rhetoric of excellence and merit also act here on several levels, and perhaps the political challenge is to keep or try in some way to keep them all together, without talking only about teaching, only about university. Thank you again for this meeting.
Fourth Roars Conference, Trento 24-24 February 2023
Round table: WHAT DO THE ITALIAN SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY "DESERVE"