30 April 2010

To: Michael Driscoll; Waqar Ahmad; Margaret House; Ed Esche

Dear All,

As someone working in the field of philosohy and literature I feel it my duty to protest as strongly as possible about your decision to close this super department.

There cannnot be any academic justification for terminating so reputable, creative, visibly active and generally beneficial a centre of philosophical energy as this one. Many of its members are world-class researchers in the Continental philosophical tradition. To have their hub of intellectual productivity removed without intellectual cause will impoverish London and British academic life considerably. I’m not exaggerating.

I’m sure you must be under all sorts of pressures to be considering such an action, but I do appeal to you to reconsider and not to be remembered for for something which can only appear as a disastrous and calamatous mismanagement of priorities to any scholar of the humanities in Europe or the US.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Hamilton,
Professor of English,
Queen Mary University of London