Lucia Buzzigoli, Ph.D., Antonio Giusti, Dott., and Alessandro Viviani, Dott. Department of Statistics, University of Firenze, Viale Morgagni, 59, Firenze, 50134, Italy
Over the last two decades the interest to assess the quality of University teaching and research has considerably grown all over the world. This is partly due to a different attitude towards the Academia: a new concern "about the increasing cost of funding university-based research ... and the need to obtain 'value for money' for public expenditure on higher education" (OECD, 1987). Moreover many Governments have been engaged in projects of administrative improvement, in order to move from a highly bureaucratized society to a new model of public management where the method of evaluation is the result of the administrative activity that must prove how well public services are provided (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2000). In Italy, this transformation involved all levels of public administration, but in our case we are interest in the effect of these new practices on University management. The evaluation process of academic activity has been enforced in 1999 with the Ministerial Decree no. 509 which defines the new organization of studies together with a new administrative regulation. In this new legal framework an increasing portion of the financial resources allocated was meant to be calculated on the base of effectiveness and efficiency indicators, both in teaching and in research. As a consequence, evaluation of teaching started very quickly, while research evaluation has not get a well defined operational status. For evaluation purposes, different statistical methods have been proposed in the literature. However most of this studies concern specific scientific projects or individual researchers. In our opinion, it is important to evaluate also and especially the activity of an entire University Department to fulfill a real performance based approach, to funding and recruitment policies. This would be of great help in the framework of the “Italian University Autonomy”. In this paper we are going to present some preliminary results of a study concerning the evaluation of the Departments of the University of Firenze. The available statistical data (collected by ad hoc statistical surveys or resulting from administrative registers) concern three different aspects of a Department activity: research, teaching, and administration. After data collection a major problem is represented by the necessity to combine unhomogenous data referring to so different aspects of the academic activity. In this paper we try to use some group of indicators to get useful information on the overall Department performance. A particular and serious problem is due also to the fact that the 70 University of Firenze Departments are engaged in very different academic research and teaching. This first result could be useful to define forthcoming funding criteria at local level. In our intentions, future advancements are mainly directed to obtain a sort of real time system to monitor and evaluate the academic activity, to improve the management control and to finally obtain a substantial improvement in the effectiveness efficiency and quality of university activity. OECD (1987), Universities Under Scrutiny, Paris. Pollitt & Bouckaert (2000), Public Management Reform, Oxford University Press.