Leiden's Philosophy Department in Trouble!

Eric Schliesser, a philosopher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, writes:

I write you because I hope you would be willing to publicize the predicament of Leiden University's Philosophy department.

In the guise of transforming graduate education at Leiden University, the new University President wishes to merge the philosophy department (and a bunch of others) into a giant Humanities/Arts department. Normally such things move at very slow pace in the Netherlands, but the University President (a specialist in employment law) appointed a committee with himself as Chair and without membership of any of the affected departments; despite assurances to the contrary, he is now implementing the committee's recommendations even before the formal consultation process has finished. The reality behind the proposal is to create a vehicle in which to slim down all the Humanities at Leiden regardless of individual performance. A free standing graduate program for Humanities is financially not viable given the way funding for Humanities research has been cut in the Netherlands. (In Holland, PhD students are paid employees who are treated as civil servants.) Once the philosophy department falls under the new accounting procedures we will be unable to replace retiring faculty or fund new PhDs. Meanwhile, our valued support staff runs the risk of being laid off.
The department is a free-standing 'faculty,' which (to simplify) means it reports straight to the University President and is responsible for its own academic policies, academic hiring, and profit/loss accounting. The department is financially secure, has growing enrollments, an ample cash reserve, and is very efficient in its management of resources. The PhD program is very small (4), but a recent graduate got a job at Washington University in St Louis and another got a prestigious Dutch fellowship. It has 12 faculty, which have strengths in the history of philosophy (we have wide coverage in Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, ethics, logic, and early Analytical philosophy). We just had a visiting committee (one of the members was Bob Pippin) which praised the faculty research productivity.

Maybe you can ask your readership to contact the University President, Prof Dr Paul van der Heijden and let him know that there is International concern and support for our independence.  Believe it or not all publicity scares the administration. I would be much obliged.

This certainly sounds like an underhanded way to destroy a well-functioning unit through administrative maneuvering.  I hope philosophers will write to President van der Heijden in support of the independence of the philosophy faculty at Leiden.