You're The Best Man For This Job, Son. What A Coincidence!

摘要

As an Italian PhD student abroad, I agree with your Editorial 'Situations vacant' (Nature 456, 142; 2008), in which you discuss issues influencing the hiring of academic staff in Italy. The day after this was published, details of yet another scandal in the Italian academic world appeared in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera under the headline 'A single candidate for a research position: the professor's son' . The emergence of a single candidate in the concorso (national competition) for a position at the University of Messina in Sicily is surprising in itself: such concorsi are rarely held, owing to the limited funding available to Italian universities.