[Taxacom] Fate of the Hungarian Natural History Museum

[Francisco Welter-Schultes]

> Stick to the importance of the museum.  Leave competing uses out of the
> argument, or you will not get what you want.  With this government,
> nothing but an appeal to nationalist chauvinism is likely to save the
> museum.

Good point. Perhaps more friendly words would also do it. The fact that
they reacted after the EU's expressed concerns in the press law case,
seems to indicate that they do not like to get a bad international
reputation for their government and country.

Actually, the students who collected some 61,000 signatures of Ph.D.
students and scientists against the German minister of defense, did that
in the form of an open letter to the chancellor Angela Merkel.
The information that such a list existed, spread very quickly along
facebook and everywhere. They had only 4 or 5 lines of text, just
expressing the main objectives. They were so unprofessional that they
passed nights deleting double and joke entries manually. People just
signed with their name, academic degree and name of the university,
nothing else, no e-mail, no address, no control functions.
When they had 20,000 after one week they printed them out, called the
press and evening TV news, and went to the chancellor's office in Berlin
to deliver them. Merkel was not there, but the effect came indirectly.
Academic conservatives in Merkel's own party started complaining
increasingly loudly about Guttenberg's behaviour. This was the most
important effect the action had. Merkel did not react, but after losing
support in his own party the minister saw himself forced to withdraw a few
days later.

A few weeks later another important politician of the German liberal party
had to withdraw from the job of a Vice President of the European
Parliament in Strasbourg, for the same reason, plagiarism in a Ph. D.
thesis (Silvana Koch-Mehrin).

We could write an open letter to the Hungarian prime minister, simply
every taxonomist signing with name, academic degree and country, and
perhaps reporting in a few sentences his or her perception about the
Hungarian contribution to natural sciences.

The next step would be to invite the press to some visible action
somewhere (does not need to be Budapest, could also be Brussels,
Strasbourg or New York) and to make sure that the international and the
Hungarian press gets to know about it.

Such a strategy could potentially bring Hungarian conservative politicians
to express themselves in the public in favour of not cutting down all the
budgets for the museums, and to leave the Budapest museum where it is.

Francisco



Dr. F. Welter-Schultes
Zoologisches Institut, Berliner Str. 28, D-37073 Goettingen
Phone +49 551 395536, Fax +49 551 395579
http://www.animalbase.org