Lascio il link di una lettera pubblicata sul corriere.it di una studentessa e trascrivo un durissimo articolo della rivista Nature sui tagli e i provvedimenti del governo.
qui la traduzione a cura di dica133.wordpress.com
NATURE Vol 455 16 October 2008
page 835-836
Cut-throat savings
In an attempt to boost its struggling economy, Italy’s
government is focusing on easy, but unwise, targets.
It is a dark and angry time for scientists in Italy, faced as they
are with a government acting out its own peculiar cost-cutting
philo sophy. Last week, tens of thousands of researchers took to
the streets to register their opposition to a proposed bill designed to
control civil-service spending (see page 840). If passed, as expected,
the bill would dispose of nearly 2,000 temporary research staff, who
are the backbone of the country’s grossly understaffed research institutions
— and about half of whom had already been selected for
permanent jobs.
Even as the scientists were marching, Silvio Berlusconi’s centreright
government, which took office in May, decreed that the budgets
of both universities and research could be used as funds to shore up
Italy’s banks and credit institutes. This is not the first time that Berlusconi
has targeted universities. In August, he signed a decree that cut university budgets by 10% and allowed only one in five of any vacant
academic positions to be filled. It also allowed universities to convert
into private foundations to bring in additional income. Given the current
climate, university rectors believe that the latter step will be used
to justify further budget cuts, and that it will eventually compel them
to drop courses that have little commercial value, such as the classics,
or even basic sciences. As that bombshell hit at the beginning of the
summer holidays, the implications have only just been fully recognized
— too late, as the decree is now being transformed into law.
Meanwhile, the government’s minister for education, universities
and research, Mariastella Gelmini, has remained silent on all issues
related to her ministry except secondary schools, and has allowed
major and destructive governmental decisions to be carried through
without raising objection. She has refused to meet with scientists and
academics to hear their concerns, or explain to them the policies
that seem to require their sacrifice. And she has failed to delegate an
undersecretary to handle these issues in her place.
Scientific organizations affected by the civil-service bill have instead
been received by the bill’s designer, Renato Brunetta, minister of public
administration and innovation. Brunetta maintains that little can be
done to stop or change the bill — even though it is still being discussed
in committees, and has yet to be voted on by both chambers. In a
newspaper interview, Brunetta also likened researchers to capitani di
ventura, or Renaissance mercenary adventurers, saying that to give
them permanent jobs would be “a little like killing them”. This misrepresents
an issue that researchers have explained to him — that
any country’s scientific base requires a healthy ratio of permanent to
temporary staff, with the latter (such as postdocs) circulating between
solid, well equipped, permanent research labs. In Italy, scientists tried
to tell Brunetta, this ratio has become very unhealthy.
The Berlusconi government may feel that draconian budget measures
are necessary, but its attacks on Italy’s research base are unwise
and short-sighted. The government has treated research as just
another expense to be cut, when in fact it is better seen as an investment
in building a twenty-first-century knowledge economy. Indeed,
Italy has already embraced this concept by signing up to the European
Union’s 2000 Lisbon agenda, in which member states pledged to raise
their research and development (R&D) budgets to 3% of their gross
domestic product. Italy, a G8 country, has one of the lowest R&D
expenditures in that group — at barely 1.1%, less than half that of
comparable countries such as France and Germany.
The government needs to consider more than short-term gains
brought about through a system of decrees made easy by compliant
ministers. If it wants to prepare a realistic future for Italy, as it should,
it should not idly reference the distant past, but understand how
research works in Europe in the present. ■
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