The issue of Higher Education represented one of the recurring topics that challenged the Ministers of Education in Italy for decades after Unification. After recalling the enactment of Matteucci’s Regolamento (1862), the present paper focuses on the discussion that took place in the Italian Parliament in the 1880s about both the draft law submitted by Baccelli and the counter-draft submitted by Cremona and Coppino. However their draft law, which attributed autonomy to universities, failed to achieve the approval of the Parliament. The idea of philosophical Faculty, unsuccessfully proposed by Cremona at that time, was resumed in the new century by Enriques but once again it was doomed to failure.