Open Letter from Germany
[sent on 17 February 2010]
Open Letter from German Researchers to
Prof. Rick Trainor, Principal, KCL
Prof. Keith Hoggart, Vice Principal, Arts and Science, KCL
Prof. Jan Palmowski, Head of of School for Arts and Humanities, KCL
Mr. Chris Mottershead, Vice Principal, Research and Innovation, KCL
Dear Prof. Trainor, Prof. Hoggart, Mr. Mottershead, Prof. Palmowski,
We, the undersigned researchers in Germany, want to join the protest against your recent plans to fire Prof. Shalom Lappin, Dr. Wilfried Meyer-Viol, and Dr. Jonathan Ginzburg and to force Prof. Charles Travis into retirement contrary to verbal and contractual agreements. All important points have been stated in the various letters of protest by now and thus we can only reiterate that it is incomprehensible why the administration of any academic institution would deliberately dismiss internationally renowned scholars of the highest esteem in light of the fact that this move will inevitably damage its reputation of excellence for years to come. We would like to add that it is furthermore unbearable to see that the administration seems to have chosen to keep silent despite the fact that the protests have reached an extraordinary extent, supported by many hundreds of scholars and thousands of students.
We urge you to reconsider your disastrous plans. We furthermore hope to see a statement on one of the publicly available channels soon.
Sincerely,
Gerhard Jäger
Professor of Theoretical Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of Tübingen
Marcus Kracht
Professor of Theoretical Computational Linguistics, Bielefeld University, Germany
Christian Ebert
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Tübingen
Detmar Meurers
Professor of Computational Linguistics, Universität Tübingen
Hans-Martin Gärtner
Assistant Director, Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin
Bernd Möbius
apl. Professor, Phonetics and Speech Communication, University of Bonn, Germany
Jens Michaelis
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany
Thomas Hanneforth
Theoretical Computational Linguistics, Universität Potsdam, Germany
Uwe Mönnich
Professor em. of Computational Linguistics, University of Tübingen
Fritz Hamm
apl. Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Tübingen‚
Edgar Onea
University of Stuttgart
Ingo Reich
Professor of German Studies (Semantics & Pragmatics), Saarland University, Germany
Stefan Müller
Professor of German and General Linguistics
Freie Universität Berlin
Ralf Klabunde
Professor of General Linguistics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
Iryna Gurevych
Professor of Computer Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Hans Jürgen Ohlbach
Professor of Computer Science, University of Munich, Germany
Malte Zimmermann,
Assistant Professor of Semantics and Theory of Grammar, Potsdam University, Germany
Alexander Mehler
Professor of Text-Technology, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Germany
Sabine Schulte im Walde
Senior Researcher, Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Stuttgart
Anke Holler
Professor of Linguistics, Department of German Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany
Manfred Kupffer
Goethe-University Frankfurt
Erhard W. Hinrichs
Professor of General and Computational Linguistics
Vice Dean, Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures
Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Germany
Hinrich Schütze
Chair of Theoretical Computational Linguistics
University of Stuttgart, Germany
Sigrid Beck
Professor of Linguistics, English Department, Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Germany
Klaus von Heusinger
Professor of German and General Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Frank Richter
General and Computational Linguistics, University of Tübingen, Germany
Stefan Evert
Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics, University of Osnabrück, Germany
Caroline Sporleder
Senior Researcher, Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany
Regine Eckardt
Professor of Linguistics, English Department, University of Göttingen, Germany
Manfred Sailer
Seminar für Englische Philologie, University of Göttingen, Germany
Ipke Wachsmuth
Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Bielefeld University, Germany
Manfred Krifka
Professor of General Linguistics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
and Director of Center of General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin
Manfred Stede
Professor of Applied Computational Linguistics, Universität Potsdam,Germany
David Schlangen
Assistant Professor, Computational Linguistics, Universität Potsdam,Germany
Stavros Skopeteas
Senior Researcher, University of Potsdam, Germany
Heike Zinsmeister
Senior Researcher, Department of Linguistics, Konstanz University, Germany
Dafydd Gibbon, B.A., A.K.C., Dr. Phil.
Emeritus Professor of English and General Linguistics, Bielefeld University, Germany
and Alumnus of King's College, London
Peter Hellwig
Emeritus of Computational Linguistics, University of Heidelberg
Carla Umbach
Computational Linguistics, University of Osnabrück, Germany
Cornelia Ebert
Institute for Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Ralf Vogel
Professor of German Linguistics, University of Bielefeld
Anette Frank
Professor of Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University, Germany
Andreas Witt
Senior Researcher, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany
Stefan Hinterwimmer
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
James Kilbury
Professor of General and Computational Linguistics
Heinrich Heine University, Duesseldorf, Germany
Helmut Horacek
Senior Researcher, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbruecken, Germany
Michael Herweg
Lecturer, Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University
Anton Benz
Senior Researcher, Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany
Elke Teich
Prof of English Linguistics, TU Darmstadt