Dissenting Students. The Impact of the “Onda Anomala” on the Italian Universities

Over the past few years European students have mobilized to oppose the cuts in the spending for higher education. These mobilizations have produced effects not only on the political system as a whole, but also on the way in which universities function and are organized. In other words, student mobilizations have had an impact on the higher education system itself. This has been the case of a recent protest campaign in Italy, known as the “Onda Anomala” mobilization, which has occurred to protest against the “Gelmini laws” in 2008. Italian students have in fact raised their criticisms towards the academic institutions to demand an alternative organization for higher education. In this paper, I will look at the effects of the “Onda Anomala” on three individual universities: the “University of Turin”, “La Sapienza” of Rome, and “Federico II” of Naples. For each university I will investigate to what extent the local student movement has produced effects on their decision making bodies (the academic senate and the board of administrators) in terms of “agenda” and “policy” impacts. My hypothesis is that movements with high levels of mobilization and disruptiveness have had a greater capacity to affect the academic decision-making than movements with low levels. To empirically test this hypothesis, I will divide my research in two stages. First, I will conduct a protest event analysis on the local chronicles of “La Repubblica” of Turin, Rome, and Naples to measure the levels of mobilization and disruptiveness of each movement. Then, I will analyze all the agendas and deliberations approved by the two decisional bodies during the period of mobilization to see both how many issues proposed by the students have been discussed (agenda impact) and how many of them have been adopted by the academic bodies.