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Abstract
Higher education systems featuring intense competition have developed world-class universities, capable of attracting top professors and students and considerable public–private funding. This does not occur in non-competitive systems, where highly talented faculty and students are dispersed across all institutions. In such systems, the authors propose the budding of spin-off universities, staffed by the migration of top scientists from the entire public research system. This article illustrates the proposal through an example: the spin-off of a new university in Rome, Italy staffed with the best professors from the three current public city universities. Such a faculty would offer top national research productivity, a magnet to attract the other critical ingredients of a world-class university: talented students, abundant resources and visionary governance.
Notes
We distinguish between elite and world-class universities: a university that is elite in a particular country is not necessarily world class. The term ‘elite universities’ is referring to institutions displaying top-level performance in research.
This university does not have a school of chemistry.
We assume that quality in teaching will also follow from scientific merit.
The complete list is accessible at http://attiministeriali.miur.it/UserFiles/115.htm (accessed January 21, 2013).
Including other disciplines, such as medicine, in the RSU would have restricted the selection of the top scientists for these fields to only two ‘parent’ universities, which would have jeopardized the aim of the simulation, i.e. the realization of a university reaching elite status in all disciplines. For the same reason we have limited the RSU size to that of Rome ‘Tre’, thus ensuring that, like the smallest of its parent universities, it would be capable of providing at least the same number of bachelor's and master's programmes in all disciplines. We note that by expanding the range of parent universities beyond Rome, it would be possible to simulate the development of larger and more generalist spin-off universities.
As frequently observed in the literature (Lundberg Citation2007), standardization of citations with respect to median value rather than to the average is justified by the fact that distribution of citations is highly skewed in almost all disciplines.
The subject category of a publication corresponds to that of the journal where it is published. For publications in multidisciplinary journals the standardized value is calculated as the average of standardized values for each subject category.
This indicator is similar to the ‘crown indicator’ of Leiden's CWTS (Moed et al. Citation1985) and the ‘total field normalized citation score’ of the Karolinska Institute (Rehn, Kronman, and Wadsko Citation2007). The differences are: (i) we standardize citations of single publications and not of the scientific portfolio of researchers; (ii) we standardize by the Italian median rather than the world average. We also consider fractional counting of citations based on co-authorship.
http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php (accessed January 21, 2013).
www.orp.researchvalue.it (accessed January 21, 2013).
An index value greater than one indicates that the incidence of faculty from the university considered is greater than expected given the total size of its faculty in that UDA.
https://dalia.cineca.it/php4/inizio_access_cnvsu.php (accessed January 21, 2013).
In the 2011 World Democracy Audit for freedom from corruption, Italy ranked 51st out of 180 countries. http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm (accessed January 21, 2013).