All over Europe universities are being urged to be more business-like. Italy, of course, is the home of the family business and it is with sorrow we hear that the president of the Conference of Italian University Rectors has offered to step down amid allegations that he abused his position as head of the University of Siena by arranging for his son to win a tenured post.
Piero Tosi, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, has denied the allegations. He has served as leader of the rectors' conference since 2002 and as rector of the University of Siena since 1994, where his son obtained his post in 2003.
In the kind of Italian judicial action becoming more familiar to British readers following the business dealings of culture minister Tessa Jowell and her husband, an investigating judge in Siena, acting at the request of a prosecutor, last week suspended Mr. Tosi, who is 65, from his rector's job for two months, pending an investigation of alleged improprieties in the awarding of several positions and the granting of a consulting contract.
Mr Tosi may yet clear his name and is being backed by the lecturers' union. Indeed allegations of nepotism are rare in academic life but Scotland, where the clan remains strong, managed one of the best with the case of Professor Stan Mason, dismissed from the principalship of Glasgow Caledonian. The National Audit Office reported that his wife had a university car, there had been favouritism in three appointments - including that of his daughter-in-law - promotional trips to the Far East by staff accompanied by their spouses had "holiday elements" and a subsidiary company of the university which was making losses continued to pay bonuses to staff including the principal's sons.
This did not stop Professor Mason winning an employment tribunal judgement for unfair dismissal which cost the university another £11,000 because they not followed the right procedures.
But, as Universities UK is fond of pointing out, there has never been an academic Enron. That we know about.
