<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear all,<br><br>My apologies if you already got another massive email about this, but it is a serious issue. Many of you already know that the department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands) has suffered a "major re-structuring" as a result of the economic crisis and consequent budget cuts.<br><br>I invite you to take 1 minute to sign a petition to stop these reforms at:<br><br><a href="http://evodevo/petition">http://evodevo/petition</a><br><br>In essence, what this "re-structuring" entails is:<br><br>1- The disappearance of the evolutionary biology teaching program in Leiden (and in the whole of the Netherlands, other than the behavioural ecology program at Univ. Gröningen)<br><br>2. Firing of more than half of the department, including well renowned researchers like Jacques van Alphen (Marie Curie Professor of Excellence), Tom Van Dooren, Frietson Galis (president of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology), Sacha Gultyaev, Patsy Haccou (executive vice-president of the European Society of Evolutionary Biology), Ken Kraaijeveld, Femmie Kraaijeveld, Hans Metz and Rino Zandee ... and of course, all their post-docs, technicians and graduate students.<br><br>3. The relocation of the rest of the department into other scattered departments (like molecular biology, mathematics, etc) with no evolution programs.<br><br>The decision was made to cut entire disciplines (rather than spread the costs over different departments) based on their "productivity" and "competitiveness" ... as measured in economic terms (otherwise, in terms of scientific output, Evolutionary Biology in Leiden was one of the most productive and competitive departments). This is a new symptom of the European Union's tendency to transform Universities into production factories that cater "the market" and the consequent demeaning of "non-marketable" disciplines like humanities, philosophy, ecology or other basic sciences.<br><br>You can find more information in the latest issue of Nature (painfully enough, the one celebrating our discipline).<br><br>If you allow me a bit of demagogy, and to put things in context, politicians have decided to celebrate our Darwin day by wiping out one of Europe's most successful and symbolically significant departments in our field: that which gave us the only evolutionary biologist (Niko Tinbergen) to ever get a Nobel Prize.<br><br>Please spread the word.<br><br>Thanks for your solidarity,<br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Andres Lopez-Sepulcre</div><div>Department of Biology</div><div>University of California, Riverside</div><div>tel. +1 951 403 3199</div><div><a href="mailto:andresls@ucr.edu">andresls@ucr.edu</a></div><div><br></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></body></html>