The Policy Gap: Deconstructing the 'Mediterranean Resistance' to European Digital Expectations.

European digital education policies often assume that resistance to innovation in higher education is primarily due to infrastructural deficits or insufficient digital skills. This qualitative pilot study challenges that assumption by examining the “policy gap” between European digital expectations and faculty realities in Southern Europe. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, the study builds on quantitative baselines collected in 2023 and analyzes a phenomenological follow-up conducted in 2025 with a purposive sample of five university professors from Italy, Portugal, and Greece. The findings confirm the persistence of a structural “Mediterranean barrier complex,” characterized by cultural attachment to the ex-cathedra lecture as a proxy for rigor, bureaucratic rigidity that penalizes pedagogical flexibility, and an “asset trap” that prioritizes campus occupancy over digital innovation. Notably, disciplinary culture moderates this pattern, with globally standardized fields such as Computer Science showing weaker national resistance. The study concludes that infrastructure- and training-focused EU interventions are insufficient when cultural legitimacy and regulatory constraints remain unaddressed. Sustainable digital transformation in Southern Europe requires policy strategies that explicitly engage with institutional culture, governance structures, and incentive systems, rather than assuming a linear deficit model of digital adoption. Although exploratory, the analysis provides qualitative validation of earlier quantitative findings and offers a foundation for future comparative European research.