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You may have seen that the administration at Kings has embarked on a cost-cutting exercise; and it has now reached the School of Humanities. The strategy for the School (which is in all sorts of ways ill-conceived and even incoherent) has two features at which we are appalled:

They are giving redundancy notices to eleven members of the School. These eleven include two members of the Philosophy Department, Shalom Lappin and Wilfried Meyer-Viol, on the grounds that the College is ‘disinvesting in computational linguistics’. IN fact that affiliation is an historical feature of their coming to the college, and does not describe at all what they do in the department; Shalom works widely in philosophy of language and mind; Wilfried does logic (he does all the formal logic). This has been done without consultation (hence the College is unaware of what S and W actually do) but following a pattern according to which a third member of the original group of computational linguists (Jonathan Ginzburg in the Computer Science) is now at the appeal stage of his redundancy proceedings (Shalom has been active in his support). This drives a hole through the middle of the department’s teaching, let alone our research. You can see Shalom’s account of what he does here
http://gist.github.com/288062
and there is a discussion on Leiter here
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/budget-crisis-at-kings-college-london-kcl-firing-senior-faculty-in-philosophy-including-full-profess.html#comments

The Head of School is planning to put the whole of the School of Humanities at risk of redundancy. We are then to be required to reapply for our own jobs (the document informing us about this doesn’t put it like that; however a man from HR who was at a meeting I went to last week agreed that this is what is happening), with the expectation that across the School they will lose eleven more posts (the practicalities of this are utterly unclear). Now the Philosophy department (one of the strongest in the School, up till now) may not lose any more posts; but the process itself is a grotesque one, requiring us to compete with long-standing close colleagues (as well as unknown and remote colleagues) for fewer jobs than there are people. This is not only morally repugnant (what would it be to survive such an exercise?) but directly inimical to the way we think philosophy should be done: through the sort of collaborative discussion in which one can treat each party to the discussion with respect and dignity.

Dear All,

Below are the contact details for the Principal, relevant Vice-Principals and Head of School. If you feel you are in a position such that they would take notice of your correspondence, please consider contacting them to express your concern at the way the King’s Department, and particularly Shalom Lappin and Wilfried Meyer-Viol are being treated. If any whole departments would like to follow UCL et. al.’s lead, I’m sure it would be greatly appreciated by everyone here. Whether it can make any difference to the management’s attitude is another matter.

Rick Trainor, Principal – principal@kcl.ac.uk

Lawrence Freedman, Vice-Principal (Strategy & Development) – lawrence.freedman@kcl.ac.uk (I guess he may be a little busy today)

Keith Hoggart, Vice-Principal (Arts & Sciences) – keith.hoggart@kcl.ac.uk

Chris Mottershead, Vice-Principal (Research & Innovation) – chris.mottershead@kcl.ac.uk

Jan Palmowski, Head of School of Arts & Humanities – jan.palmowski@kcl.ac.uk

Students in the Department are currently drafting a letter to the College management laying-out our grievances. When finished this letter will be circulated in the Department for signing, and a copy will be made available online in the form of a petition to gather further signatures.

Regards,

Peter Ridley
(Graduate Student)