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Italy goes on violating human rights The Herald (Scotland) A letter to The Herald THE Italian university system, immersed as it is in systematic dishonesty and corruption, reflects a decidedly negative aspect of the Italian character and invites a promising comparison with the Sicilian Mafia (June 24). Highly qualified candidates for university teaching posts are regularly eliminated to make way for the mediocre but "protected" favourites with the same clinical ruthlessness of a Mafia killer eliminating his helpless victim. Enticing rewards for tacit acceptance of a corrupt system, conformity to a school of thought with its godfather figurehead, and exaggerated servility and respect for the system's protagonists, on the one hand, and heavy penalties for truth, intellectual independence and moral integrity on the other, all strengthen the comparison. The important difference consists in this: whereas the Mafia has come to represent the highest and most coherent expression of the nobly executed art of the corrupt, the universities remain at a more primitive and less sophisticated level than their Mafia superiors. One is therefore well advised to harbour the maximum distrust in the real academic competence of everyone who forms part of this system or who has passed through it. An Italian medical specialist could have been forced to buy his way through his specialisation courses, an Italian civil engineer might be incapable of building bridges that stay up – and an Italian professor of English language and literature might well have a ludicrously inadequate knowledge of English. That is why he teaches only literature. Thus the entire problem of the teaching of language is left to the foreign lecturer, who teaches an average of 10 classroom hours per week at a (top) rate of over £500 per hour. The Italians see nothing strange in this sort of discrimination, as they see nothing strange in teaching foreign literature without having an adequate grounding in the language in question: publications are usually translated, revised and often rewritten (except, of course, where they have simply been copied word for word) by foreign lecturers who are quite naturally unacknowledged. Publications, like fruit and vegetables, are usually reckoned in kilos. Following Italy's failure to implement the two European Court of Justice decisions which found the Italian State guilty of discrimination against foreign lecturers in Italian universities, the Committee for the Defence of Foreign Lecturers has more recently brought these and other interesting facts to the attention of the European Commission. As a result Italy has been condemned by the European Parliament for violation of human rights against foreign lecturers – the first European country ever to be so condemned. It also has passed a resolution as a result of careful research by the European Parliament into language teaching at Italian universities, which states Parliament's unwillingness to accept for the foreign lecturers anything less than economic and legal status equivalent to that of an associate professor. Results so far? The Italian Government Agency ARAN has recently made foreign lecturers an offer they can't refuse: a contract, termed by President Scalfaro himself "una vergogna" ("a disgrace"), which downgrades the foreign lecturers' work and pay conditions even more and which has been widely described as "an invitation to leave the country". Mafia code language? The comparison is ill-suited; for Mafia pride and sense of dignity would never have subscribed to the sort of embarrassing account Italian universities are giving of themselves throughout Europe.
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