Sussex Chemistry Faces Closure

A University of Sussex proposal to reduce the number of academic staff in its chemistry department from 14 to seven, change the name of the department to the department of chemical biology, and abandon chemistry degree programs has invoked impassioned responses from British chemists.

The plan will cripple all the chemical sciences at the university, including biochemistry, chemical biology, and medicine, says Sir Harold W. Kroto in a video appeal to the university (http://tinyurl.com/j2qmj). Kroto, who is now chemistry professor at Florida State University, was a member of the Sussex chemistry department when he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of fullerenes. The department also boasts two other winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Sir John W. Cornforth, who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, and Archer J. P. Martin, who moved to Sussex after his 1952 Nobel for the invention of partition chromatography.

"The plan is fatally flawed," Kroto says. ???Only a modicum of scientific understanding is needed to realize this.???

The chemistry department at Sussex received a coveted grade 5 in Britain's most recent research assessment exercise. The top rating is 5*. Only 19 chemistry departments in the U.K. received grade 5 or 5* in the 2001 exercise.

The chemistry department at Sussex has "great luster and pedigree" in teaching and research, comments Richard Pike, chief executive of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry. "RSC believes that no university can claim to be a real university without chemistry," he says. "It is a universally accepted premise around the world that chemistry is the central science, in the absence of which there is a void that affects a campus."

The Sussex proposal is part of a strategic plan to strengthen the university's research and teaching in biosciences alongside investments in other science areas and the arts. The plan to close the chemistry department follows the closure of chemistry departments at Exeter University, Kings College London, and other British universities.

"I feel passionately that these cuts must be fought and that overseas opinion must be rallied in support," says Martyn Poliakoff, chemistry professor at the University of Nottingham, in England.

The proposals were put to the University of Sussex Senate, the university's academic body, on March 17 and will go to the Council, the university's governing body, on March 24. The Senate endorsed the strategic direction of the proposals but proposed to the Council that the university should hold off making decisions on the plan for "refocusing" the chemistry department. The university now aims to complete a review of the options in the next six or seven weeks and then call a special meeting of the Senate.

On March 27, the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee, which is made up of 11 members of the U.K.'s parliament from different political parties, will hold "an evidence session on the changes of chemistry provision at the University of Sussex." The committee will hear from Alasdair Smith, vice chancellor of the university; Gerry Lawless, head of the chemistry department; and Steve Egan, acting chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council in England.