Reforming the university in fascist Italy

Writing about the vicissitudes of universities in 1950s America and in Nazi-occupied France (see previous posts) made me wonder if anyone had looked at the broader picture, of how higher education copes with totalitarian regimes more generally. It turns out they have. A 2005 book, Universities under Dictatorship, edited by Stuart Connelly and Michael Grüttner (Pennsylvania University Press), brought together a number of studies of higher education systems in countries as diverse as Czechoslovakia under communism and Spain under Franco.


In  most cases, the book deals with regimes that took power after a period of violent struggle or even large-scale war.  Almost inevitably, in this kind of context the university system in each country was rapidly and drastically transformed.

The exception was Italy, where the previous regime was not overthrown by civil war or foreign conquest, and where the introduction of fascism was carried out under a mask of constitutionalism and widespread social acceptance (despite the brutality used by the regime against its opponents). The experience of Italy under 20 years of fascist rule, begun in peacetime and proclaiming 'modernization' as its goal, may thus offer parallels to the context of recent changes in European higher education.

In this volume, Ruth Ben Ghiat’s study of Italy’s higher education system under fascism charts how Mussolini’s regime imposed new values on the previously humanist and culturally diverse institution that had been the traditional Italian university. A year after Mussolini came to power in 1922, a reform of the university system took place which had the following effects, according to Ben Ghiat:-

 - de-professionalisation of academics

- emphasis on the creation of elites

- nomination of University Rectors and Deans by the state: no longer chosen by university professors

- Senate-style meetings of professors were abolished

Appointees of the fascist state, Deans and Rectors frequently went about their jobs wearing black shirts.

The content of the university curriculum also fell under the control of the state. A new field of study was keenly encouraged, corporativism, which meant the reorganisation of the economy on fascist lines.

When in 1938 Jews were purged from University positions by Ministerial decree, almost no academic faculty members declined to occupy the positions they left vacant, according to Ben Ghiat; rather, they were keen to take advantage of the opportunities for professional advancement.

By a grim irony, the architect of the 1923 university reforms, Emilio Gentile, was himself to complain nearly twenty years later that the imposition on universities of fascist ideology meant that they were now unable to think, teach and research freely, but were imprisoned by ‘rigid scholastic structures’. But by then it was too late: ideological conformism had stamped out originality, freedom to innovate, and the pursuit of international excellence.

The means by which this outcome had been achieved - de-professionalising the academy and removing its autonomy, and the cult of ‘leaders’  who imposed compliance with the regime’s values - seems not without relevance to the context of contemporary debate on the future of European university systems.