Farewell to Asn worries academia

The elimination of the Asn as we have known it so far worries the academic world. And not as of today. In a meeting held on 8 May 2024 (i.e. a year before the Bernini bill saw the light of day, ed.) dedicated to recruitment, the National University Council (CUN) suggested confirming the national scientific qualification "as a necessary requirement for access to the first and second bands of the role of university professors". On the condition of correcting its distortions and thus putting 'the commissions in a position to effectively assess the quality and originality of the publications submitted for evaluation'.

In fact, as we recount in the adjacent article, the government bill chose to go in another direction and introduce self-certification instead of the Asn. Since then, the fears of the academic world do not seem to have subsided.

This summer, a letter was sent by a number of commissioners in the CUN 10 (Ancient, Philological-Literary and Historical-Artistic Sciences) and CUN 11 (Historical, Philosophical, Pedagogical and Psychological Sciences) areas to Minister Anna Maria Bernini, pointing out that "replacing the 'centralised' assessment of scientific quality with essentially quantitative criteria (moreover, on the basis of candidates' self-certified requirements), and entrusting the selection exclusively to local competitions, does not represent progress at all, but a return to the past". What is more, with an Asn window still running: the sixth four-month period of the 2023-25 round should, in fact, be concluded by 10 March 2026.

In another, more or less contemporaneous document, the Accademia italiana di economia aziendale (Aidea), the Conferenza delle associazioni scientifiche di area giuridica (Casag) and the Consulta delle scienze politiche e sociali (Council of Political and Social Sciences), on the other hand, judged as reasonable 'the abandonment of the current two-tier recruitment system by eliminating the Asn procedure'. Provided that the implementing decree with the stakes for self-certification is issued 'with the effective involvement of the scientific community as a whole'. Equally crucial, for them, is the issue of the draw to choose the external commissioners. And here it remains to be seen whether the corrective measures introduced in the Senate committee will be sufficient to overcome the resistance that has circulated in the past.

In the meantime, movements of professors who fear that they will be 'exodus' as a result of the changeover from the old to the new habilitation system are emerging in some universities. A group of associates of the University of Bari in possession of habilitation has put forward a proposal on career progressions that would protect the aspirations of those who have obtained "the Asn, following reasoned judgments by a national commission, compared to those who, with the new system, will simply have to certify it in order to access competitions". Otherwise, they write, there is a risk of a new boom in appeals. Which was precisely what the Bill hoped to curb.