The Evaluation of the Italian University System: a Recent History

The paper presents an analysis of the main events regarding the making of a national university evaluation system during the Nineties and the main results achieved so far. The structure of the evaluation system presents some problems related to the role of internal evaluation units inside the universities and, at a central level, to the connections between the National University Evaluation Council and the Ministry for Universities and Scientific and Technological Research. Recent national laws assign to the internal evaluation units a difficult task: the external evaluation of their universities, with a clear problem of clashing interests. Therefore, we propose a reform of the national evaluation system in order to assign the task of university self-evaluation to the internal evaluation units, while strengthening the powers of the National University Evaluation Council that should perform a true external evaluation of universities.