Solidaridad con los colegas del Field Museum

Nos ha llegado un mensaje de nuestro colega Peter J. Makovicky invitandonos a solidarizarnos con la situación de nuestros colegas del Field Museum of Natural History. Os lo adjuntamos, con los enlaces para poder firmar el apoyo.

Dear all,

as many of you have already heard, the Field Museum is going through another round of budget cuts. This time, however, we are facing a very drastic level of cuts - $5M to our operating budget of ~$70M (>$25M of which are tied up in depreciation, debt service, and service contracts). The bulk of these cuts will fall on the two scientific divisions, Collections and Research, which encompasses our 25 million specimens and the staff who curate and manage them, and ECCo, a smaller unit dedicated to conservation efforts. The $3M cut represents roughly a halving of our operating salary budget and will entail lay-offs of a quarter to one-third of our staff, which has already been experiencing hiring freezes since 2005 and two rounds of cuts in 2008 and 2010. There can be no doubt in anyone's mind that this will severely affect our research capabilities and impact upon our ability to maintain our world-class collections. Our Board and administration have essentially admitted that cuts are to be targeted at scientific staff and faculty  to the press:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-field-museum-to-cut-staff-overhaul-operations-and-limit-research-scope-20121218,0,6939773.story?track=rss

An exigency committee has been convened and begun meeting as part of mandated procedure to look at the potential to dismiss tenured faculty. As a colleague and someone who has worked with our collections, I urge you to take a few minutes and sing our on-line petition, which you can find at:
https://www.change.org/petitions/protect-research-at-field-museum-of-natural-history-chicago

Please distribute this to your colleagues around the world. We hope that the combined voices of a global community of researchers will have a positive impact and have our board and administration reconsider the distribution of cuts.