Measuring the Efficiency of Academic Departments: an Empirical Study

The evaluation practice in Italian universities, introduced by the “Bologna process”, has been renewed by a subsequent reform in 2010, that has redesigned the Italian academic governance. In this new context, the revisited role of the Departments, which have become the focus of academic activities, has motivated the objective of comparing their performance. The paper opens with a brief review of the literature on university performance evaluation with data envelopment analysis. After the presentation of the characteristics of the Italian university system and, in particular, of the University of Firenze, we synthetically describe the method and indicate the specification that will be applied, together with the set of input and output variables. The final section contains some concluding remarks and suggests directions for future research.