University reform without strategic direction: political capacity and analytical weakness in the 2025 reforms

This article examines the 2025 Italian university reforms as a revealing case of how the Italian political system formulates, interprets, and implements higher education policy. Adopting a policy design perspective and drawing on the concept of policy design spaces, the study shows how interventions concerning academic recruitment, admission to medical degree programmes, distance learning, and quality assurance and evaluation areorganizedalong three prevailing logics: emergency-driven measures, ex post regulation, and reforms with predominantly procedural and symbolic content. Combining documentary sources with relevant literature, the paper argues that these logics reflect an institutional configurationcharacterizedby high political capacity but limited analytical and technical capacity in policy design. Within this framework, policy interventions operate primarily as mechanisms of institutional legitimation and maintenance, producing an incremental layering of rules that serves more tostabilizeexisting equilibria rather than strategically reconfigure them.