Totti University (sometimes Ateneo University) is a public research university in Ateneo, in the San Branik metropolitan area of the Republic of Kaskiv. It was constituted in 1968 by the education provisions of the Social Charter of 1968, passed by Giancarlo Totti’s government, which merged the town’s four independent colleges into a single national university, and it was named for Totti while he was still prime minister. The university is Kaskiv’s principal centre for architecture and town planning, public law and the social sciences, and its graduates hold a large share of the posts in the country’s planning departments, newspapers and progressive political organisations.
History
The Ateneo colleges (1839–1967)
Ateneo College was founded in 1839 by a lay educational trust on farmland west of San Branik, and the settlement that grew up around it took the college’s name. A university charter followed in 1876, when the college was empowered to award degrees as Ateneo University. By the middle of the twentieth century the campus held four separately governed colleges, teaching arts and letters, law, mathematics and natural philosophy, and commerce.
The colleges were small, generously endowed and duplicative. Each maintained its own library, its own entrance examinations and its own professorial chairs, while the degrees they awarded were not uniformly recognised by Kaskivian professional bodies. Successive rectors proposed federation in the 1930s and 1950s without success, because the colleges’ governing trusts guarded their independence and the agrarian-conservative Liberal-Conservative Party (LCP), which dominated national politics for most of the period, saw no reason to disturb them.
Founding under the Social Charter (1968)
The Social Charter of 1968 committed the state to universal healthcare and a contributory pension fund, and its education schedules required institutions capable of training the planners, statisticians and public administrators the new services assumed. The United Socialist Party (USP) government accordingly legislated the merger of the Ateneo colleges into a single university, with a national rather than a local catchment and a curriculum weighted towards the applied social sciences.
The measure was contentious less for its substance than for its name. Naming a public institution for a serving prime minister was without precedent in Kaskiv, and LCP deputies attacked it as a personality cult built at public expense. Elio Pazienza, the leader of the LCP and an MP for Granaio Reale South, argued that the university should bear the name of the town that had housed it. The merger carried as part of the Charter, by 107 votes to 80 with 13 abstentions, and the new institution took the name Totti University; the LCP amendment to strike his name from the title was defeated by 96 votes to 74. It opened in 1969 with 2,100 students under Ottavio Serranti, a San Branik statistician who had advised the charter’s pension commission.
Serranti’s administration built the first of the modernist teaching halls behind the 1876 library, added a medical faculty in 1970 to supply the charter’s health service, and admitted the university’s first doctoral candidates. Serranti retired in 1979.
Expansion under the Gas Era (1978–1994)
The LCP had opposed the university’s foundation, but the pipeline royalties that reached Kaskivian education during the “Gas Era” of Dario Moretti financed its largest period of growth. Computing and engineering grants were distributed to institutions near the capital, and Totti University shared in the programme that turned Finicoli into the country’s software centre.
Lidia Conti, who had taken one of the university’s first doctorates in 1971 with a thesis on town planning and industrial urbanism, became chancellor in 1980 and held the post until 1987, when she resigned to contest the new mayoralty of Ateneo. Fausto Bertoldi succeeded her and remained chancellor until 2000.
The Tycoon Era and the Ateneocene (1994–2016)
The privatisations of Vulpiano Luppino’s “Tycoon Era” froze public stipends, and the university substituted corporate endowments and fee income for state grants. During the same period the campus became a centre of the student protest movement that formed in opposition to Luppino; Icilio Lana, later the Green-Left Coalition’s founder, was prominent in it.
Conti returned as chancellor in 2000 and served until 2016, overlapping for most of that period with the mayoralty of Sigismondo Guerrero (1999–2017). The two administrations shared staff and premises: planners trained in the university’s faculty wrote the pedestrianisation and participatory-budgeting schemes of the “Ateneocene”, and the campus served as the testbed for the municipally owned AteneoFibra network. The arrangement drew criticism from the LCP and from Luppino’s New National Voice (NNV), which complained that a public university and a municipal government had become a single political apparatus. Conti’s defenders replied that the city had been the faculty’s field site before either of them held office.
Since 2016
Benedetta Sarti, a public lawyer, became chancellor in 2016. Under her administration the university has expanded its external research income and its intake, and has continued the practice, begun in the 1970s, of offering tenured posts to scholars exiled from the Divine Republic of Kresimiria. The Faculty of Arts and Letters holds the largest concentration of Kresimirian dissident academics outside Kruhlstutt.
Campus
The university is arranged around the stone quadrangles of the former colleges, which stand among the nineteenth-century institutional buildings for which Ateneo is known. Behind them lie the teaching halls of the founding period and a library extension of the 1980s. The campus is connected to central San Branik by the electrified light-rail line opened under the Green Steppe programme, and it is deliberately built without the perimeter surveillance infrastructure common at Kresimirian institutions.
Academics
The university’s faculties are dominated by the built environment and the applied social sciences.
- Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning: The institution’s flagship faculty and the origin of its reputation. Conti’s doctoral thesis was supervised here, and the faculty supplied much of the technical staff of the Ateneocene municipal reforms.
- Faculty of Law: Trains Kaskivian public and administrative lawyers; its secular curriculum was defended in the National Assembly against cultural conservatives in the LCP.
- Faculty of Medicine and Public Health: Founded in 1970, two years after the Social Charter, to staff the new universal health service.
- Faculty of Political and Social Sciences: The most explicitly political of the faculties, and a recognised recruiting ground for the USP, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Green-Left Coalition.
- Faculty of Arts and Letters: Houses the university’s exile scholars and its programmes in philosophy and comparative literature.
The parliamentary seat
The university gives its former name to a constituency of the National Assembly. The seat of Ateneo University was contested under that name from the 1970 general election, and Stefano Quaglia held it for the USP from 1970 until 1994, campaigning on university autonomy and secular curricula. Boundary reviews after 1968 left the constituency’s name unchanged, so the seat is still called Ateneo University although the institution it is named for has not used that title since the year of its foundation.