Subject: [sigdial@sigdial.org] Linguistics at King's College London
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 15:48:40 -0000
To: <sigdial@sigdial.org>
Linguists targeted for Redundancy at King's College London
The management of King's College London has embarked on a program of radical restructuring in both its Science and Humanities Faculties. This program involves redefining research missions of Departments in these schools under thematic areas that, in Humanities at least, downplay many major areas of research and teaching, and explicitly exclude linguistics in any department. As part of this process, Jonathan Ginzburg has been targeted for redundancy on the grounds that he no longer fits the redefined group for applied logic and the theory of computing in the Computer Science: with testimony from leading international researchers that his work on the logical analysis of interaction falls directly within the new group description, this matter is now under appeal. Professor Shalom Lappin and Dr. Wilfried Meyer-Viol of the Philosophy Department have been summarily told that the College is "disinvesting" from computational linguistics, and that the plan for restructuring the School for Arts and Humanities will mean the elimination of their positions in Philosophy by August 31. The move is an attempt to use computational linguistics, a non-existent entity in Philosophy, to target these two researchers. Lappin's research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, integrating core areas of philosophy, specifically intensional logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language into cognitive science, machine learning, and computational learning theory. Meyer-Viol is first and foremost a philosophical logician who does 75% of the logic teaching in the University, who publishes both in this area, in formal grammar, and in issues at the interface of syntax/semantics. They are fully integrated into the Department's research, teaching, and administrative activities. The School is also targeting other linguists, and other departments.
It is worth pointing out that the King's Philosophy Dept. was ranked third in the UK in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, and the Principal, Rick Trainor, has referred to the Philosophy Department as "the jewel in the crown" of the College, so that this is an extraordinary way to encourage one of its strongest departments, ironically at a time when interdisciplinary research is very generally recognized by national and international funding bodies as the way forward.
The issue is however wider than this, since these moves are made as an instance of a broad procedure affecting the entire academic community of two primary Schools of the College. Initiating movements to give people notice is going on in parallel with supposed consultation, with no attempt at finding alternative ways of reducing the salary budget: indeed all academics in Humanities have been told that they are in effect “at risk of redundancy”, even though the consultation process is only now beginning to take place. This is part of a pattern of widespread cuts and “restructuring” that is currently going on in British universities, but for such a distinguished institution of research, scholarship, and teaching to allow these management-led procedures in determining both academic content and individuals/areas to be targeted sets a very dangerous precedent for the suppression of academic freedom and the destruction of the autonomy of research across the UK and beyond.
We urge you to write to the management at King's to protest these actions.
The people to send email to are:
Professor Rick Trainor (principal@kcl.ac.uk) Principal,
Professor Jan Palmowski (jan.palmowski@kcl.ac.uk), Head of School for Arts & Humanities,
Professor Keith Hoggart (keith.hoggart@kcl.ac.uk),Vice Principal for Arts &Science,
Mr C. Mottershead (chris.mottershead@kcl.ac.uk) Vice Principal for Research & Innovation