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.