Suchergebnisse

This volume collects the proceedings of the seminar organized by the Unique Guarantee Committee for Equal Opportunities of the University of Florence, which focuses on a collective discussion regarding work, study and research conditions in contemporary universities. Drawing inspiration from the reflections of two Canadian teachers, M. Berg and B.K. Seeber, on the feelings of frustration and inadequacy due to the rhythms and objectives sometimes imposed in the university context, this volume focuses on the experiences and moods of all the people involved in the academic community with regard to the obstacles linked to lack of time and economic resources and to increasing workloads. It also offers a reflection on how to create relationships and networks, inaugurate sharing experiments on research and teaching experiences, as well as good practices to contrast those individual and collective drifts which may result in organizational discomfort, thus severely damaging the pursuit for the core values of public universities.

This second volume of Quaderni "Cesare Alfieri" offers a consideration on some basic aspects of our academic system. Among the many topics worthy of attention, the Scientific Committee has decided to put the accent on the theme of the relationship between universities and economic and social development. In response to the transformations and the dramatic downsizing of the higher education system, how is it possible to affirm the centrality of the education of the "human capital", aimed at the growth and cohesion of society? The essays gathered in the volume offer, each one from its own point of view, interesting insights and points of discussion on how, at the present time, universities can contribute to the economic and social development of a country in which territorial and social inequalities are deepening, despite reduced public resources, limited degree of autonomy and uncertain relations with other national and local actors.

The archive of the Italian National Association of University Teachers sheds light on the little-known contribution a vanguard of university teachers gave to the reform process of Italian Universities, which started in 1968 after the failure of the Italian bill n. 2314. ANDU immediately identified itself in Giorgio Spini's leadership: he was Professor of history at the Faculty of Education of the University of Florence, and he brought together union leadership and constant political and cultural work, which could show the problem with universities was a long-term matter. The student movement has been one of ANDU's main dialogue partners from the beginning, and the association has always supported their initiatives, condemning the police repression and the closing of the academic authorities. In this context, the right to education becomes the primary goal of the university reform, not only for overcoming its classist nature, but also for significantly contributing to question the relations among classes and the balance of power in the Italian society.

Over the past 30 years, all European countries have been affected by reorganization processes concerning their higher education systems. In this volume, two aspects of this type of reorganization are discussed: changes in governance models and differentiation processes within the various higher education systems. The new governance models of higher education systems are based on three pillars: autonomy, evaluation and competition. Everywhere, universities were managed in a more business-like fashion, strengthening the central leadership and reducing the power of the collective bodies. In Italy, autonomy has developed in a distorted way, and for a long time has not been accompanied by evaluation and competition. In addition to reforming governance, European governments have responded to the students' mass demand for university access with different backgrounds and ambitions, differentiating the higher education systems in the concerned countries. There was a first surge of differentiation in the 1960s and 1970s, and a second one took place in the late 1990s. Italy was an exception, and in this lies the origin of most of the problems of Italian universities, which the volume discusses while also offering possible solutions.

The articles collected in the book offer insights on major aspects that determined the success and development of the "ius commune", progressively spread out across Europe, and from Europe to those parts of the world that felt the influence. Three prospects are hereby taken onto account, in a time span of seven centuries (XII-XVIII): the consilia of Jurists, the training paths in universities (texts, literary genres, doctrines, teaching and teachers) and the canonical science.

This work originates from the conference organized by the Equity and Diversity Committee of the University of Florence and the National Conference of the Gender Parity Organisms of the Italian Universities held in Florence the 12th October 2018. The papers here collected illustrate the obstacles that women encounter in their academic career, especially in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The issues the volumes deals with are still worth taking into consideration considering that women represent only the 30% of the academic research staff at the world level and that only the 30% of women students choose STEM faculties.

How does the current regulatory change in academic work influence the emergence of innovative commercial behaviours among industrial engineers within public universities? In particular, an attempt was made to reconstruct the emergence of an entrepreneurial regulatory dimension as a social construction process involving the main investigators and research groups in third academic mission activities. An in-depth qualitative analysis is carried out based on semi-structured interviews with academic engineering personnel, against the background of a reconstruction of both the development of industrial engineering as an academic discipline, and a recognition of the main changes that have taken place in the Italian academic field in recent years.

For some years now the Universities have assumed a dynamic role in fostering the enhancement of enterprise, making a direct contribution to the strategic management of intellectual property and the transfer of research deliverables, as well as in the training of potential entrepreneurs and the creation of structures offering support to new enterprises. Through the elaboration of empirical evidence from two quite different and hardly comparable institutional contexts – the American Babson College and the Italian University of Florence – this study analyses the potential activities of entrepreneurial matrix, in terms of relations, resources and incentives, offered for the use of young businesses in the start-up phase.

The volume contains the documents of the study day held in Florence on the 4th October 2012 and presents the contributions of nine young scholars of proven competence, belonging to different Italian universities. The multifaceted Greek poetic production of the post-Hellenistic age is investigated through its literary genres and the specific issues it poses: mythological-narrative and didactic epic, theological oracles, pagan and Christian hymnography, an epigram, survival of the poetic expressive code in the prose of the early Byzantine age. The essays are different in perspective - critical-textual, exegetical, historical-literary - but are united by a solid philological basis; moreover, each of them offers innovative ideas that make the volume of great interest for the international scientific community.

The volume contains eighteen original essays, written - upon invitation - by internationally renowned scholars from various Italian or foreign universities. The major issues that recent papyrus discoveries have raised (or re-proposed) on the text and interpretation of several of Menander's comedies are addressed, outlining an authoritative and fully updated picture of our knowledge in this regard. Among other things, the first fruits of the edition (with photography) of a new, previously unpublished fragment of the famous (and discussed) Michigan papyrus are offered. All reports present remarkable aspects of editorial novelty, with philological, linguistic and literary comments, relevant for the cultural debate on Menandro's comedy, and therefore for the history of ancient theater and its evolution, as well as for the study of the influences exercised from the New Comedy on the later Latin and Italian tradition.

1938 in Italy is marked by the introduction of the racial laws which ejected Jews from schools and universities, preceding similar measures in Germany. The aim of the author is to illustrate the debates in parliament around the Day of Memory and on holocaust denial before dealing with the events of 1938, in order to underline their contemporary significance and to interpret them as linked and not separable. After showing the progress that has been made in terms of historical research and the difficulties that the political world has experienced in taking this work into account, the volume examines the losses in qualitative terms in Italian university teaching and the huge difficulties encountered by professors who had lost their posts and struggled to return to their former positions. The case of Florence is studied closely within the framework of the transformations to university institutions which took place during the Fascist period. The indifference or the silence of the intellectuals, including Gentile, is underlined.