Dear all,

After a week's absence I am back at my desk in Berlin and want to thank all
who have contributed so richly to our discussion of the actual
job-perspectives and working-conditions in Italian Studies. If I may add
two comments:

1) Pat Sloane, Maria Predelli and others have pointed out against my own
more "apocalyptic" complaints, that the actual scarcity of job-openings may
be of temporary/seasonal nature and does not necessarily indicate a
critical stage in the development of our discipline. While this may be true
with regard to the last weeks which had provoked my complaints, I
nevertheless think that a critical stage is reached if in Germany, for
instance, during the last six years I never counted more than one or two
publicly advertised openings for post-doc positions in Italian or
Italian+French literature (linguistics were not much better) each year. It
is true that a significantly higher number of positions was filled without
being advertised publicly, but for those of us who have to compete on the
open market the situation remains critical and does not seem to improve.
The situation was and still is better in the USA and maybe also in the UK,
but even in the Anglophone world the number seems to be decreasing, as also
others have observed and as the last issues of the MLA job-list seems to
attest. It is also right, as Giorgio Cardorini and others have pointed out,
that the development of our discipline must be evaluated in comparison with
other disciplines, and that placement rates in general, including Italian
related positions outside the more limited sphere of universities and
colleges, must be considered. Mary K. Refling, to whom I am particularly
grateful for her contributions to this discussion, has given us valuable
bibliographical pointers to relevant studies and statistics, and I will
follow here suggestions and do some reading in order to understand the
situation better.

2) Mary K. Refling, Leslie Z. Morgan and Gloria Allaire have commented on
what seems to be a disappearance of tenure-track positions in the USA. In
Germany, the situation is somewhat different: we don't have any
tenure-track positions, but only fixed term positions for doctorands and
post-doc lecturers (normally 2 or 2+3 or 3+3 years), on the one hand, and
tenured positions for professors and for a specific -- and today very rare
-- type of lecturer (Akademischer Rat, normally a post-doc position), on
the other. For language instruction there are temporary (and part time)
positions as well as permanent ones. But tenure-track, with a probatonary
period of four or five years and the possibility of an ensuing permant
appointment, is practically absent in our system of academic employment (at
least in the human sciences, as far as I know). During the last years, this
system has been increasingly subject to criticism, mainly for two reasons:
first, the disproportional number of temporary positions at
sub-professorial level produces too many unemployed academics who, after
having obtained their doctorate (2+3 years) and their Habilitation
(additional 3+3 years) have no real chance to get one of the comparably
fewer permanent professorships but are also too old (and/or inappropriately
qualified) to find a position on the non-academic market; second, many or
allegedly too many of the happy few who obtain a permanent professorship
lose their interests to prove and enlarge their competence in research and
especially in teaching, withdraw from scholarly and educational competition
and just enjoy the possibilities of enacting departemental intrigues and of
gaining a stable salary for a minimum of work. Personally, I regard this
latter point criticism as mostly inadequate, whereas the disproportion of
temporary vs. permanent positions (aggravated also by a similar
disproportion of temporary positions for doctorands vs. post-doc lecturers)
actually seems to be a serious problem to me. To improve the situation, it
has been proposed to change the permanent positions into temporary ones (as
a means to get rid of the "lazy professors" or at least to refresh their
interest in academic work), or to create tenure-track lines according to
the North-American model. The second solution, which I second, would of
course require that actual temporary positions as well as permanent ones
are sacrified in order to establish new tenure-track positions. Opinions
differ whether we could do with a smaller number of positions. Most of my
acquaintances here in Berlin use to deny it. Yet last week I spoke with a
colleague who runs a departement with ca. 6000 students, twice as big as my
department in Berlin, but with half the number of staff that we have in
Berlin. To believe him, it works. To believe another colleague who has
worked under him and has seen how he runs his department, it even works
remarkably well. So maybe a reform of the occupational system (sacrifying a
certain number of temporary and permanent positions in order to establish
and secure tenure-track lines) together with administrators who know how to
organize their given personal resources could lead us somewhere.

I have picked only two minor points, but I would like to know more also
about other issues which have been raised: should we really recruit
students, and if so, how can we develop teaching programs which can qualify
them for more than only for academic unemployment? What would be the role
of philology, of historical linguistics, and of earlier periods of Italian
literature (even of literature itself, compared to cultural studies in a
wider sense), if we really want to increase (or at least preserve) the
actual number of students? Are the traditional essentials of our discipline
really in conflict with current notions of the "practical use" of Italian
Studies in non-academic sectors, and how well informed are these current
notions, if it comes to deciding what not only the individual lawyer or
travelling agent, but what our society (or societies) need? Always
assuming, of course, that Italian Studies might still have a task beyond
conveying basic language skills and elementary understanding of Italian
culture.

  Otfried

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