As students and faculty in Tuscany continue to
protest reforms to education and cuts in funding, education minister
Mariastella Gelmini announced that she has launched a probe into the financial
situations of three top Tuscan universities.
Gelmini wants to understand why the universities of
Florence, Pisa and Siena cannot balance their books. Over the past months, each
of the institutions has reported having massive debts. In responding to the
probe, officials at Florence University stated that they are in a better
situation, having sold off properties, laid off staff and fixed their mortgage
rates.
Nonetheless, Gelmini says, the probe will continue: ‘I
have called for checks in those universities that are near bankruptcy; it just
so happens that they are also the ones where protests have been the strongest’.
Some regional dailies have called the move a
‘vendetta’ against protesters, who have become more and more creative in
expressing their dissent.
On November 5, a group of university researchers and
professors defying a city ordinance, washed car windshields at a traffic
intersection in Novoli. But instead of asking for spare change in exchange for
their labors, they handed out leaflets enjoining, ‘Let’s clean the dirt off and
get a clear look: hurting universities hurts everyone.’
Several ‘windshield washers’ wore signs
identifying themselves as ‘Researchers in search of a future’. On November 8,
high school students chained themselves to Florence’s Baptistery.
In Pisa, protesters marched through the Piazza
dei Miracoli, where the Leaning Tower stands, accompanied by four donkeys.
Puzzled tourists watched as members of the veterinary science department held
an open-air class on the rearing and reproduction of the endangered Amiata
donkey. Their students held banners that read ‘Cats, horses, donkeys, cows and
dogs don’t want education in your hands.’
At the general strike held by state schools on October
31, an estimated one million university and high school students marched in
Rome after parliament approved the centre-left government’s controversial
cost-cutting state school reforms. Universities have called a general strike on
November 14.
