“How can we be attractive if I can’t tell my applicants now if they can compete for tenure in three years’ time?” asked Fabio Pammolli, the founder and former director of IMT Lucca.

“We can save our teachers from the forest of Italian regulations by making recruitment procedures culturally accessible to foreigners,” he said, walking through the corridors of a 17th-century convent that has been turned into a university dormitory. “We can hire assistant professors in four months, but we just cannot hire full-time professors in a reasonable time frame.”

The nine tenured professors hired at IMT Lucca since 2011 are all Italians with international backgrounds who were more attuned to the slow pace of normal procedures.

“When they offered me this position, I was thinking of moving to Brussels,” said Massimo Riccaboni, 39, an associate professor of economics and management at IMT Lucca. “I decided to stay in Italy for personal and many other good reasons, but the academic career here is so slow moving that it scares people away.” Previously, he was a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon and a researcher at Stanford university.

For decades, professors in Italy have been hired through a complicated entrance procedure theoretically open to Ph.D. holders from anywhere in the world. Practically speaking, it was accessible only to those who could read Italian and who knew about openings often posted during the summer holidays in the national gazette, the Italian government’s journal of record.

The Education Ministry tried to improve the quality of the selection process by introducing a Web-based certification. Starting July 27, applicants could upload their résumés and publications to a Web site to apply for eligibility to teach at the university level.