Between sociology and policy of education

Abstract

I am a recently-retired full professor at University of Rome La Sapienza. Before touching on my current activities and future plans, I’d like to illustrate the pathway which has brought me to where I am today, and especially the most significant events from a professional, civic and personal point of view. Firstly, I would mention that both the beginning of my academic career and the definition of my identity as a sociologist of education occurred later in life than in the cases of many of my colleagues. My first working experiences were in politics. In the 60s, I headed the Youth Movement of the Christian Democrat Party, and following that worked for a research institute devoted to economic planning at national level (ISPE, Istituto di Studi per la Programmazione Economica). There I focused my attention on education, research and training and was responsible for this sector from the mid-60s to the late 70s. Prominent figures in that period were A. Giolitti, who was the Minister for Budgeting and Planning, and the economist G. Ruffolo, who was very attentive to social and cultural policies and was the institutional leader of research activities in that context. After gradually distancing myself from the principle of the political unity of Catholics which the party intended to represent, my relationship with the DC and its left wing, to which I had always belonged, took a hard knock and I resigned from it. Successively, I became one of the founder members of a new left-wing Catholic party called MPL (Movimento Politico dei Lavoratori) and led by L. Labor who had previously been president of ACLI (Associazione Cristiana dei Lavoratori Italiani), a Christian workers’ movement. After the failure of this attempt in the 1972 general election, together with the majority of the MPL members I joined the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party. This was then led by R. Lombardi, one of the main representatives of that area of European socialism which advocated a program called ‘revolutionary reformism’. From that moment, my life took on a parallel direction: on the one hand a renewed political commitment, and on the other the professional sphere, first dedicated to planning and then, from 1980 onwards, as a university professor of sociology of education. There was an evident link between these parallel directions, in that within the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) I was appointed to steer the ‘School and University’ department and in that role was directly involved in the elaboration of several reform projects which, however, met with strenuous resistance from the powerful conservative component in the governing coalition. Only at the end of that period, when the socialist A. Ruberti became Minister for the University and Research, did some of these projects become law. In the meantime, however, I had reached another turning point in life, due to my growing disillusionment with politics and the moral and political degeneration I observed within the Socialist Party. In the early 90s, I therefore decided to break away and concentrate all my attention on university teaching and research. In the following years, I was able to fully appreciate the attraction of academic work. Finally, I was free from the tensions and asperities of politics, as well as the feeling of impotence I had so often experienced in the previous phase. In a personal biography, as in that of an institution, we frequently encounter a kind of path dependency, that is, a tendency to establish a form of continuity with the past, albeit in new modes and contexts. At a certain point, I was called on by others, as well as by my personal motivation, to assume political responsibility once again, this time however within the academic sphere. I was dean of the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ from 2002 to 2008. This experience was often rich in cultural, civic and social significance, especially in a phase like the one in question, in which the challenges posed by the implementation of an ambitious, problematic and disputed reform were to be met. Once again however, this experience was fraught with the stresses and frustrations encountered before in my political activity, also due to the growing impoverishment and malady which afflicted and continue to afflict the public university, which is now on the edge of collapse, in my country. As I have already said, today the managerial commitments as well as most of the teaching ones are behind me, and I find myself once more at a new beginning. Among the projects I am working on, I would like to mention the re-launching and empowerment of a scientific review which may be considered also political in broader terms—Scuola Democratica—which had not been published for several years.