rightfully justify the confusion that comes with being an American abroad.
To start, as much as the political atmosphere in the United States has proved promising, in Italy unfortunately this hasn't been the case. The government under Berlusconi, has been moving to privatize the university system in Italy. The formula is simple, cut public funding for public universities proportional to the amount of money received from private investors. The question is, who are these private investors that are going to invest in Italian universities. On top of all of this, universities are now being required by the government to scale back the hiring of researchers; for every five posts vacated, only one new professor/ researcher can be hired.
Everyone, well, everyone meaning the students and professors at least, is alarmed.
This all being said, a professor in our course called Welfare States and Economic Sociology made a brief presentation about the current crisis in the Italian university system. He cited the fact that there needed to be some structural changes being that Italy has an alarmingly high drop out rate at almost 50 percent. That being said though, universities in Italy have made substantial efforts to decentralize campuses in order to increase accessibility to students outside major cities.
It's a difficult issue.
He continued by explaining statistics that the government is citing to justify privatization. According to the professor, world universities are ranked by two factors alone: student to teacher ratio and the amount of "hits" for the reading and citing of published material by faculty members. The student to teacher ratio is indeed unfair for Italian university professors as Italian universities provide decent educational opportunities but suffer in quality based on the sheer number of students enrolled. The issue of the number of "hits" on the readings of faculty members is a little more problematic. He made the case that because Italian researchers publish in Italian, they receive less hits than their French, Spanish and obviously English speaking counterparts. He only mentioned in Italian that he didn't seem to think he should "have to lose his own language".
He finished in saying, while Italian universities may not be ranked in the top 100 worldwide, they do preform very well at providing an average level of education for all. This, he deemed better than having a "few stellar universities" and a lot of "rather poor quality" institutions.
Ok. I guess my main problem, which when looking back on his argument now seems quite petty, was the implications of cultural imperialism implied by the publishing in English and the over appreciating of North American universities. Comparing the two systems and considering the professors comments, I agree that there are some structural inefficiencies here. That being said, I find it hard to believe the fact that North American universities are overappreciated simply because of the happy circumstance that they are anglophone.
I almost found myself defending the privatization of university education, something that you would be hard pressed to hear when I'm in the New World. It's interesting to see how opinions vary with context and how subjective our realities really are.
Anyway, I'm less annoyed by what was said now after reflecting on how it was said.
Moving on.
Today I was relieved to find out that Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States. Whether or not you agree with his politics, this was a momentous and much needed turn for America. Our great democracy has spoken and proven its merits. Obviously there remains a lot of work to be done, but it's high time that the stale air of eight years of misguided policy be blown out of Washington.
In any case, this is momentous and historical. Unfortunately, while I was obsessively checking the electoral map I also had to work on a group project. It was a presentation of an article for the same Welfare and Economic Sociology course I mentioned above. My roomate and I admittedly waited to the last minute and were unhappily surprised to find out that we both only did half the reading.
My friend Karin and I discussed getting doughnuts for the class if Obama won. Here, funny enough, there is an artisan bakery called American Doughnuts that makes doughnuts, lemon squares and other fatty American baked goods that cause me hours of only child eating guilt and angst. They even do American brunch and dinner. It's incredibly amusing and ridiculously overdone, but I love it.
Anyway, because of the group project, I almost backed out.
Today, however, was monumental; a once, maybe twice in a lifetime cultural change and thus needed to be celebrated appropriately. We ended up buying the doughnuts, priced at a light, 21.50 Euro a dozen. In class, we made a brief announcement in English and Italian about Obama's victory. Although bringing doughnuts or bagels is something that we do often at meetings and classes in the States (mainly to incite people to participate in group discussions through a perverse but wonderful system of incentives structured around food), Karin and I didn't really know how this would fly in the Old World... too folksy?
Sure enough, American doughnuts brought to you by real, live Americans was a success. Everyone, students around the world, applauded when we announced that Obama did win. It was really quite moving to have people congratulate us, especially friends from places like Iran that are often unjustly demonized by our media.
Here is the photographic evidence of the event:
The doughnuts were far too perfect...
...notice the red, white and blue shirt.
I hope that this is really only a microcosm of the good that is to come by a change n administrations. This is all admittedly a bit too optimistic and idealistic, but hey, we all have to believe in something. It was nice to bring a little piece of Election Day to the Old World and be mini-ambassadors of the United States' new found good will. We'll see what changes will really come in the coming months, but for now maybe everyone should step back, chill out and have a doughnut.
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