In the high-ceilinged chamber, five black-robed men sit on a dais behind an imposing carved bench, underneath the inscription “The Law Is Equal for All.” Facing them a few yards away, a similarly clad man stands behind a lectern, arguing for the plaintiffs in the case of Bivort et al. v. the University of Verona.
Among the spectators sits one of the plaintiffs, a bespectacled, balding man with a neatly trimmed gray beard, listening carefully and taking notes. Nothing in his expression suggests anxiety or surprise. For most people in Italy, having one’s case heard by the country’s highest court would be a momentous occasion. But for David Petrie, such proceedings have become almost routine.
Over the past quarter-century, the 56-year-old Scotsman has attended, in the capacity of plaintiff or interested observer, at least 80 court hearings at various levels of the Italian and pan-European judicial systems, all in cases, like this one, of alleged job discrimination by Italian universities.
In the process, Mr. Petrie has become the public face of a movement by foreign higher-education instructors who seek pay and working conditions equal to those of their Italian counterparts. This has made him a symbol for the European Union’s failure to realize one of the essential goals of its founding treaty: the free movement of workers.
Mr. Petrie, whose wanderlust brought him to the northern Italian city of Verona after stints in Libya and Greece, says he did not set out to be a crusader. His first lawsuit, in 1984, was against the University of Verona, where he had recently started working as a part-time instructor of English. The university forbade him to supplement his income by working for other institutions, yet refused to grant him full-time status with insurance and pension benefits like his Italian colleagues. He saw it as a clear-cut case of nationally based discrimination, forbidden by European law.
“I thought it would be a problem that we’d get resolved fairly quickly,” he says. “And I think in a normal country, it would have gotten resolved quickly.”
Instead that lawsuit was the first of at least eight that Mr. Petrie would eventually bring against the university. The suit also inaugurated his career as an activist for Italian academe’s foreign instructors, generally known (though no longer officially classified) as lettori, or lecturers. Mr. Petrie eventually helped establish the Association of Foreign Lecturers in Italy, to compensate for what he calls the poor representation that Italian academic unions offer their foreign members.
Mr. Petrie was not the first foreign lecturer to take his grievances against Italian academe to the European level. As an organizer and publicity manager, though, he stood out among his peers. Early on he saw that the lecturers’ campaign required the involvement of politicians and the news media.
Such an approach was needed, he says, because ordinary citizens are not permitted to bring cases before the European Court of Justice, the Luxembourg-based tribunal whose rulings take precedence over decisions by national courts. Only the European Commission, the E.U.'s executive branch in Brussels, can bring such cases.
So Mr. Petrie and his colleagues turned up the pressure. The commission is “far more likely to support you if you’re making a noise in the press,” he explains. “And in order to make a noise in the press, you have to get the [European] Parliament on your side.”
To that end, Mr. Petrie estimates that he has made about 40 separate lobbying trips to the E.U. institutions in Brussels and in Strasbourg, France. Those efforts eventually helped elicit three parliamentary resolutions, including one in 1995 that condemned the University of Verona for violating the lecturers’ human rights.
An especially memorable lobbying session was a 1993 bus trip to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, which Mr. Petrie organized for University of Verona lecturers and sympathetic students. One of those on the bus was the British writer Tim Parks, who at the time was teaching English at Verona, and who later used the episode as the basis for his critically praised novel Europa (1997).
In the novel, the trip is led by a glad-handing academic politician with an extracurricular interest in his female undergraduates. Aware that readers might infer a real-life model for the character, the author thought it prudent to show Mr. Petrie the manuscript ahead of publication.
“I was afraid David might take me to court, because David takes more or less everything that moves to court,” Mr. Parks says. (Mr. Petrie has brought and won two suits for defamation, in one case for being compared to a Stalinist secret policeman.)
“I sent Tim a very, very nice fax saying, ‘Look, Tim, you do whatever you think is best,’” Mr. Petrie recalls. “‘However, if this book is perceived by people to be damaging toward me or my interests, I cannot guarantee that I wouldn’t sue you.’”
Mr. Parks subsequently rewrote the character as a half-Indian Welshman in order to obscure any resemblances. “It was probably thanks to David that I made the person more interesting, by making it less like David,” he says.
Mr. Petrie’s critics include Henry Rodgers, an Irish instructor at the University of Rome La Sapienza, who left the association’s board in 2000. Mr. Rodgers argues that some of Mr. Petrie’s litigation has actually weakened the lecturers’ position and charges that he represents only a “very small percentage” of their peers.
In response, Mr. Petrie says the association has “somewhere around 350 to 400 members,” out of about 1,900 foreign lecturers nationwide. He characterizes the dispute with his erstwhile Irish collaborator as a matter of internal politics.
Such politics will no doubt take up a good part of the book Mr. Petrie says he is writing, an anecdotal account of his campaign with the working title “Rubber Wall.” The term has to do not with insane asylums — though Mr. Petrie acknowledges that many regard him as a “nutter” for his pursuit of his cause — but with the national government against which he has struggled for nearly two and a half decades.
“‘I know my state is a rubber wall,” he recalls an Italian official telling him several years ago. “‘You’ll be old and gray, and you’ll still be bouncing off it.’ And I said, ‘Well, OK, but in the meantime I will apply as many acids to your rubber wall as possible.’”
The structure has proved resilient. After the European Court of Justice ruled that Italian universities must offer the lecturers the same open-ended (in effect, lifetime) contracts for which their native peers are eligible, the Italian government created a new job category for foreign academics, again with lower pay and less security.
The European Commission persisted in its attempts to force Italy’s hand, and in 2004 it recommended that the Italian government pay a daily fine of 310,000 euros ($388,000 at the time) until it complied with the Court of Justice rulings. But the court ruled two years later that the commission had failed to prove that Italy was continuing to defy E.U. law, so the fine was never imposed.
“It’s all over but the shouting,” says Dympna Hayes, an Irishwoman who teaches English at Rome’s Tor Vergata University, expressing a growing sentiment among the lecturers. Although scores of lawsuits brought by hundreds of lecturers are still proceeding through the Italian courts, hope for relief from the European Union has dimmed.
Mr. Petrie has not given up, however, having long ago redefined his goals in a way that could render even failure a kind of success.
“I started saying about 10 or 15 years ago, we will either prove that free movement of workers inside the European Union is a sham or it isn’t,” he says. “And the evidence is that it’s a sham. Your rights are theoretical.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Notes From Academe Volume 54, Issue 13, Page A36
