[Bgsa] Solidarity with our colleagues at Univ.Leiden

[Andres Lopez-Sepulcre]

Dear all,

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.

I invite you to take 1 minute to sign a petition to stop these reforms  
at:

http://evodevo/petition

In essence, what this  "re-structuring" entails is:

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)

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.

3. The relocation of the rest of the department into other scattered  
departments (like molecular biology, mathematics, etc) with no  
evolution programs.

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.

You can find more information in the latest issue of Nature (painfully  
enough, the one celebrating our discipline).

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.

Please spread the word.

Thanks for your solidarity,
Andres Lopez-Sepulcre
Department of Biology
University of California, Riverside
tel. +1 951 403 3199
andresls at ucr.edu




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