Dear LAGB members, 

You may want to be aware that colleagues at the University of Surrey have been invited to apply for voluntary severance as part of a "financial resilience" plan to deal with pressures that are all too familiar in the current climate of UK higher education. You can see the unions' Open Letter to the VC at - https://surrey-ucu.org.uk/open-letter-from-the-campus-trade-unions-11-03-24/.

Due to still-evolving events, this post is for information only. In the meantime, we remind all members that the LAGB is available for support and advice. Please contact me to schedule a brief chat if you would like to share how linguistics is faring at your university. There need not be an acute situation; the more information we have, the better we will be able to tailor the support needed for our field as a whole in terms of recruitment, outreach, interdisciplinary connections, and more.

Please also see the letter written by Lesley Jeffries on behalf of UCGAL (University Council of General and Applied Linguistics) in support of linguistics at Kent:

http://www.linguistics.ac.uk/university-of-kent.html

You are also welcome to post any thoughts in reply to this thread. Keep in mind that forum posts are publicly visible to non-members, although only logged-in members can see the name associated with the post.