[Bgsa] Solidarity with our colleagues at Univ.Leiden

[Carla Essenberg]

I think the URL is actually: http://evodevo.eu/petition/

Carla

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Andres Lopez-Sepulcre <andresls at ucr.edu> 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
>
>
>
>
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>



-- 
Carla Essenberg
PhD Candidate
Department of Biology
University of California, Riverside