YUGUSLAVA VITALY YUGOSLAVIA TAIV Italian students challenge elitist reform of higher education FOR SOME years, the Italian media have tried to counterpose the new generation, the youth of the 1980s, to those who had led the movements of the 1968-1977 period. Conformist, studious, worried about their careers, attached to the values of individualism and the family - such was the portrait of today's students drawn by the major Italian newspapers and widely held by the public. A new flareup of student struggles has suddenly swept away these commonplaces and revealed them to be mystifications. Certainly, the struggles of youth today do not express the same ideas or the same forms of political radicalization that marked the preceding movements. But they express nonetheless the values of solidarity, egalitarianism and democracy which bear the traces of their predecessors and bear witness, in spite of all the ruptures and changes of the 1980s, to the persistence of a memory of the struggles of the past. ISAAC PARODI ISAAL PARODI A T THE BEGINNING of the student mobilizations of the last two months, a situation of advanced decay existed in the Italian universities, whose structures have remained almost unchanged since the beginning of the 1970s, even though the student population is today three times larger. The discontent of the students has material roots which are obvious to all -hardly any Italian university has a modern campus, the libraries are extremely poor, and there is a shortage of lecture theatres.
Education is costly and students receive only very limited support from the state. Student grants (which benefit only a small minority of students) go from 400 dollars a year in Palermo (the minimum) to 2000 dollars in Milan, which is absolutely insufficient to live off. Several faculties offer no professional openings, limiting themselves to keeping the future unemployed off the streets. Moreover, the conditions of life for the students are often very difficult - university restaurants and hostels are rare, whereas rents have increased considerably in all the big towns.
If this catastrophic situation constituted the background to the movement, its detonator has been the legislation for reform of the present university system presented by the Minister of Scientific Research, the Socialist Antonio Ruberti. Inspired by the conceptions underlying the Devaquet law, rejected three years ago by French students (see /V 111, December 22, 1986), this legislation ostensibly proposed "financial, administrative and educational autonomy" for the universities, but in reality proposed what amounted to their privatization. Private funding for university research
According to the legislation, teaching and university research would have to be financed by industry and private capital, and adapt itself to their needs. Consequently, representatives of industry and private companies would have to be given places on the administrative councils of the universities, not just to give their opinions on different scientific projects but with decision-making power. This reform does not radically change the existing situation, when already, in Rome, any citizen 25 able to give 100 million lira to the univer-
ITALY sity can sit on the administrative council.
The government proposes to rationalize and accentuate this tendency.
The immediate consequences of such a reform are obvious. The humanities, already strongly penalized by the existing budgets, would be completely abandoned and marginalized. Thanks to their new
"autonomy", the universities could fix the conditions of admission and costs of registration as they wished. This would immediately create a hierarchy between a small nucleus of prestigious and modern universities, reserved for an elite with access to number of second class universities, along the means necessary to enter, and a great the Japanese or US models.
In Italy, such a reform would deepen still further the disequilibrium between the north and south of the peninsula. The universities of the north would transform themselves into research laboratories in the service of the big companies, whilst in the weakly industrialized south, the universities — already few enough and growing weaker in a number of areas — could well become totally useless and able to bestowed by certain politicians seeking an survive thanks only to the finances electoral clientele.
Giving Palermo university to the Mafia
This explains why the student protests began in Palermo, capital of Sicily. In this region, to privatize the university would hands of the Mafia. Starting on December mean quite simply putting it into the
5 of last year, the Palermo student strike movement rapidly translated itself into an occupation of the town campus. Gradually, the movement spread throughout the peninsula. By mid-January, nearly every one of Italy's 50 universities was occupied. The big northern towns - notably
Milan - joined the movement somewhat later than those of the south and centre.
One of the features marking the movement is its democratic functioning. No grouping or political force has been able to impose its own priorities on it. The forms of struggle have always been decided in the course of very lively general assemblies, in which every position can express itself. The students have also shown that the new technologies can be utilized in a democratic and "alternative" manner. Fax machines have replaced the old duplicators and have allowed the establishment of a network of communications between the different universities.
The breadth of the movement was apparent at the national demonstration held on February 3 in Rome. According to press estimates, 100,000 students and high school students (the latter having a massive presence) from all over the coun try, streamed through the capital's streets. The occupations continued, Minister 26 proposed law on "university autonomy" • Ruberti having refused to withdraw his International Viewint 4180• MAu_L
Che is ready to discuss the details - not the content — but only with non-strikers).
The immediate goals of the movement are the withdrawal of the proposed legislation and the safeguarding of the right to study. The students defend a certain number of simple but fundamental principles.
For Rome high school student Alessandro
Mantovani, "The kind of school we want must be free, for ordinary people, capable of giving an equal chance to everybody. It must be pluralist and above all public, without any equivocation. The legislation proposed by the government and the Confindustria (the employer's association)
proposes to save our schools through privatization. After having consciously abandoned the public services, they want to entrust them to Berlusconi, Agnelli and their friends" (L'Unità, February 3,
1990).
The flowering of the struggle has radically changed the climate inside the universities. Some rightist organizations, for example the fundamentalist Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione
(Communion and Liberation), linked to the Christian Democrats and strongly implanted on the campuses for a decade or more, have lost their hegemonic role.
In Milan, its traditional bastion, Comunione e Liberazione was marginalized during the assembly that decided on the occupation of the university.
Far left provides cadres and organizers
On the other hand, the militants of the organizations of the revolutionary left, very much in a minority among the students, have often played a role in the forerepresenting the political leadership of the front of the struggle. Without movement, they have provided it with an important number of cadres and organisers. This has been the pretext for an attempt to witchhunt the movement, which the reactionary press has presented as being "manipulated" by the extreme left. Decidedly, the nightmare of the anticapitalist revolt of the 1970s has not ceased to haunt the corridors of power.
The Socialist Party daily, whose crude and vulgar anti-communism increases in the same measure as its readership diminishes, characterized the leaders of the students in struggle as "archaic communists of the ilk of Causescu" (see Avanti!, January 19, 1990). The Christian Democrat Minister of the Interior Antonio Gava, known for his links with the Camorra (the Naples mafia), has even invoked the possibility of "infiltration" of the movement by terrorist groups, a theme which has been taken up, in more moderate terms, by the head of government Giulio Andreotti (Il Corriere della Sera, February 13, 1990). These hysterical reactions have only resulted in the radicalization of the novement which has taken an openly 1 be caracter and has gradu-
Hovimento ally politicized itself. The amphitheaters of the faculties have been renamed "Tiananmen Hall" and "Intifada Hall".
The Communist Party (PCI) is divided on the question of the proposed reform and the university protest. Numerous intellectuals and lecturers who support the PCI have expressed their support for the
Ruberti proposals. This is not astonishing
— the adhesion of the PCI to a plan for the privatization of the universities confirms the choice of this party in support for a market economy and a "modern" society founded on the dynamism of private enterprises. But reality shows that the social- democratic modernity of the PCI does not enthuse the new generations.
Communist Youth for autonomy and privatization
On the other hand, the Federation of
Communist Youth (FGCI) finds itself at the heart of the mobilizations and tries to play a role as "mediator" thanks to its presence on a national scale. The FGCI is favourable to autonomy and thus the entry of private capitalists into the universities, provided that the decision-making power of the students is increased so they can exercise "real" control over the functioning of the universities. In short, the PCI seems yet again to be torn apart by its contradictions. On the one hand, a radical opposition to privatization of the universities puts in question its neo-liberal choice and its "modernity"; on the other, it cannot permit itself to ignore or oppose itself to a social movement of such breadth, for fear of rendering still more weak and precarious its implantation amongst youth.
Until now, the majority has maintained its opposition to the reform in its totality, demanding its withdrawal and the resignation of Roberti.
The movement faces two major problems. First, the necessity of creating a national coordination which is capable of organizing the continuing struggle and forming a common front against the reform bill. But secondly, it is necessary to go beyond the limits of the university and to liaise with the other social sectors which are the target for projects of privatization. Some initiatives in this direction have already been taken, but they are any rems, however, the sole way in which the battle can be on t