Re: PhD positions at Leicester, UK

[Steve Vickers <s.j.vickers@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

One of the ironies … No, I’m being polite. One of the particular stupidities of the plans is that Leicester has always had close connections between CS and pure maths. Simona Paoli, one of the main category theorists in pure maths there, founded the Yorkshire and Midlands Category Theory  Seminar, YaMCATS, which involved their CS department and now includes the School of CS at Birmingham.

That’s an existing research strength of Leicester that has a role to  play even in the envisaged “future research identity”, yet the plans are to kill it off.

The VC, Prof. Nishan Canagarajah, is an engineer whose field is multimedia signal processing: so it seems clear that these plans are his baby. But his dreams are blinding him to the organic reality of the Leicester University that he is supposed to be leading.

Steve Vickers.

> On 10 Jun 2021, at 02:38, droberts.65537@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> For what it's worth, we should point out the elephant in the room:
> 
> "The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, Nishan
> Canagarajah, wants to lay off all 8 of their pure mathematicians,
> including the only 2 women with permanent positions, and then rehire
> just 3 of these mathematicians — to do teaching, but not research.  He
> and his flunkies claim:
> […] to ensure a future research identity in AI, computational
> modelling, digitalisation and data science requires ceasing research
> in Pure Mathematics […]"
> (source: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2021/01/problems_at_the_university_of.html)
> 
> "The London Mathematical Society has been informed that the University
> of Leicester is consulting over a proposal to reduce the size of its
> Pure Mathematics Group to be teaching only, in order to “meet the
> rising market demand of artificial intelligence, computational
> modelling, digitalisation and data science”. The Society strongly
> opposes this proposal and believes it to be seriously flawed for the
> following reasons. ..."
> (source: https://www.lms.ac.uk/news-entry/09022021-1444/mathematics-university-leicester)
> 
> And as a result:
> https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/11533/Global-boycott-of-University-of-Leicester-begins-today
> 
> If someone can update us on the status of the various category
> theorists and allies it would be very useful.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David
> 

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