Leading music scholar quits over ‘endemic’ cancel culture

A MUSIC professor has resigned in protest at “dogmatic” attitudes to decolonisation which could stop students learning Beethoven and Wagner.

Paul Harper-Scott, 43, who taught musical history and theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, has quit academia entirely after more than 15 years at the institution, stunning other experts in the field.

Explaining his reasons for leaving, Prof Harper-Scott said he had become “profoundly disillusioned” at how “increasingly dogmatic” universities are becoming, with cancel culture seemingly “endemic”.

He cited the “increasingly common view in musicology”, that “19th-century musical works were the product of an imperial society... the classical musical canon must be decolonised”, as an example.

Prof Harper-Scott, who has been editor of the book series Music in Context and a trustee of the Society for Music Analysis, warned: “An outcome of the first dogmatic statement could be that music departments stop teaching music by Beethoven, Wagner and co.”

This would be “in the frankly insane belief that doing so will somehow materially improve current living conditions for the economically, socially, sexually, religiously, or racially underprivileged”, he added.

Instead, he urged music departments to recognise classical music’s “great importance of social history” which can offer “intellectually critical insights” into the time in which it was composed.

In a parting shot at the cancel culture sweeping British campuses, he warned: “In recent years the dogmatic mode of thinking, in which uncritical commitments are enforced by mechanisms involving public humiliation, no-platforming, and attempts to have scholars fired, has become to seem like it has become endemic.”

He added: “If universities become a place where that basic commitment to scepticism and a critical mode of thinking is increasingly impossible, they will have ceased to serve a useful function. I am not optimistic.”

Having joined Royal Holloway in 2005, he observed that academia “is a place filled with [quite] well-meaning people, but on the whole not with brave people, not people who are willing to follow the truth wherever it leads”.

His resignation is among the most stark cases of the backlash among scholars at attempts by students and faculties to “decolonise” university degrees and pull down statues, which intensified after Black Lives Matter protests.

Royal Holloway did not comment.