The new institutional governance of Italian state universities: what role for the new governing bodies?

In 2010, a comprehensive reform required Italian state universities to restructure their institutional governance by revising their statutes. This interpretative paper aims to evaluate whether the Italian reform is congruent with its declarations, examine the variations in the implementation within the same country of a unitary national regulation and assess whether Italian state universities have incorporated the principles of the new law coherently with its political aims. Our analysis shows gaps both in the decision stage, wherein state regulation is in contrast with the declared intent to increase autonomy, and in the implementation stage. In our view, Law 240 aimed to change the administrative board role from a democratic to a partnership model, while the dominant board model is now the stakeholder model (or, in several cases, quasi-democratic).