Doctoral Program in Economics and Management at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy |
This website is about the story of the Doctoral Program in Economics and Management at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy) and more generally on the strategies, organizational patterns and recruiting policy of the School itself. We have chosen to make all this public because, we believe, the lessons of these stories go well beyond the confines of the School itself, but have to do with crucial political issues such as the mechanisms of formation of the leading professional/research/managerial class in a country; the roots of the "brain drain"; the causes of the persistent weakenesses of the national system of research and training.
In brief as the records (The Program) show, the Doctoral Program has quickly become one of the leading European institution in the field. Moreover, it is nested in an institution forged on the model of the French "Grandes Ecoles", with relatively abundant, and growing, resources. Despite all that, the institution has systematically refused to expand the permanent faculty in order to eventually achieve a staff sufficient to guarantee the viability of the Program in terms of research supervision and training (Documents and Evidences). Interestingly, the School over the last 4 years choose to hire almost only people who sometimes have a number of international publications and citations lower than that of the students themselves (Indeed the number is sometimes zero !).
All this happens against an institutional background at the Sant'Anna School, also documented here wherein the very "constitutional rules" are twisted in order to perpetuate an autocratic governance, largely insensitive to any accountability in terms of scientific output - which should indeed be one of the core criteria of evaluation for an institution claiming to have "excellence" as its mission. This sad saga, to repeat, illustrates dynamics which go well beyond the specific case and, politically, also beyond the traditional "left" vs. "right" divides. Rather they impinge on the very ethos of the academic profession and, unfortunately, suggest many doubts on the very reformability of the Italian University system.
Giovanni Dosi | |
Alfonso Gambardella |
