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