Linguistics at King's College London

[Doug Arnold]

Hello, 
I'm forwarding this at the request of Ruth Kempson. In short, it says that a number of 
colleagues at KCL in London are under threat, and asks for our support. 
Apologies for cross-posting. 
Best,
Doug

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 at kcl.ac.uk) Principal,

Professor Jan Palmowski (jan.palmowski at kcl.ac.uk), Head of School for Arts & 
Humanities,

Professor Keith Hoggart (keith.hoggart at kcl.ac.uk),Vice Principal for Arts & 
Science,

Mr C. Mottershead (chris.mottershead at kcl.ac.uk) Vice Principal for Research 
& Innovation