[Bgsa] Solidarity with our colleagues at Univ.Leiden

[Andres Lopez-Sepulcre]

My apologies, the link to the petition page was incomplete. Please go to

http://evodevo.eu/petition

Thanks,

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




On Feb 13, 2009, at 3:24 PM, Andres Lopez-Sepulcre wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/bgsa/attachments/20090213/87c0fcf8/attachment.html