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AIPPh Documentation Leusden 2009
cannot be lost in silence, for it is very important to make a qualified disciplinary
curriculum for future philosophy teachers possible.
1.2 The Italian Case
The Legge Gelmini 240/2010 declares higher education institutions to be “primary seat
of free research and free education.” Obviously, everybody wishes to consider and verify
how to preserve and defend this freedom of research and teaching. The reform-law’s
impact is not assessable yet, due to the high number of competences that it assigns to
the Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca Scientifica (MIUR) and to the
government itself, competences that are quite substantial: (a) special resources
allocation (art. 4); (b) boosting quality and efficiency of the university system (art. 5);
(c) determination of the “areas of specialization” for the new tenure track procedure on
the basis of a “national scientific habilitation” (art. 15); (d) accreditation of doctoral
programs (art. 19); (e) appointment of committees for evaluating and funding research
projects (art. 20); (f) criteria for evaluating candidates for non-tenure-track positions
(art. 24); (g) salary raises for professors and researchers (art. 8). The reform bill has
instituted a new evaluation agency, the Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema
Universitario e della Ricerca (ANVUR), which places itself alongside with the already
existing Consiglio Universitario Nazionale (CUN). It is baffling to notice that while the law
mentions twenty times the ANVUR, it mentions only thrice the CUN. It might be a
meaningless frequency figure. The fact is, though, that the CUN is an elected board, the
expression of the scientific community as a whole, which elects its representatives. On
the contrary, the seven ANVUR board members are in their totality MIUR appointees,
which leaves doubts open about their independence. First and foremost, the absence of
a humanities representative within the ANVUR board is a not good auspice as regards
the government’s intents in this domain. Committees are at work to write new programs.
We are in flux. The point is: better to have something than to have nothing. If this is the
perspective, in Italy we have been privileged: since the reform bill promoted in 1923 by
the idealistic philosopher Giovanni Gentile, philosophy has been reserved two week-
hours for three years in both Humanistic and Scientific Gymnasia. Beginning with the
last decades of the last century, philosophy teaching has been extended to a number of
further orders of schools. Students have the chance of receiving a formal introduction to
philosophy, which in Italy is structured historically: first year ancient and medieval (Tales
to Nicholas of Cusa), second modern (Valla to Kant), and third contemporary (Fichte to
Derrida). Philosophy oriented interdisciplinary modules are proving to be very promising
in countries in which cutting off a year out of high-school curricula be connected with
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