To the Board of Governors of Middlesex University:

I wrote to your Vice Chancellor on April 29th in my capacity as current External Examiner for the MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory at your University, expressing my shock and dismay at the extraordinary decision to close all of the Philosophy programmes at your institution, and to assert my strong belief in the extremely high quality of provision in this discipline at Middlesex. I have yet to receive any kind of reply to, or indeed acknowledgement of, this email.

I now learn of the quite remarkably misguided decision made by Middlesex senior management to suspend both Professors Peter Osborne and Peter Hallward – for whom I have the highest professional and personal regard – along with a number of students, merely for the crime of opposing, in a perfectly legitimate fashion, a decision which the international outrage that has greeted it should convince you was a major mistake.

Quite apart from the fact that I fail to see how I, or indeed any other self-respecting academic, could continue to serve in an external capacity at your institution while such outrageous actions are taking place, I emphasise again the immeasurable damage that this is doing to Middlesex’s international standing in a number of fields.

I strongly and passionately urge you to put a stop to what is taking place at Middlesex – a university for which I have always had the greatest respect – before it is too late.

With regards,

Dr David Cunningham
External Examiner, MA Aesthetics and Art Theory

Dr David Cunningham
Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells St, London W1T 3UW