Earlier this month, the University of Huddersfield (West Yorkshire, UK) announced the layoff of 37 faculty in the School of Arts and Humanities. Two colleagues in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages have been laid off. The remaining three have been invited to compete against three colleagues from other disciplines for only three positions. There is a risk that no linguistics faculty will remain after this competition, and no plans are in place to support current doctoral students in such a scenario.

Our colleagues at Huddersfield have made important research contributions in pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics, corpus linguistics, and much else. As the publisher of the language magazine Babel, Huddersfield also engages in commendable public education work. LSA members can protest these layoffs and show their support for linguists and linguistics at Huddersfield by signing this petition.