Decolonisation amounts to a radical attack on most forms of Western knowledge whose adherents see classical music as an expression of a colonial perspective, according to a professor of music.
Mr. Pace is a founding member of London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom, Britain’s first council to support academic freedom in higher education.
He said the organisation was needed to “counter the effect of movements” such as gender identity ideology, decolonisation, and critical race theory, issues that have grown in the last five or six years.
The initiative came about earlier this year, when Mr. Pace joined with sociologist Alice Sullivan and mathematician John Armstrong, inspired by the example of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard University, which was also founded earlier this year devoted to expressive freedom.
He said that they were quickly joined by a range of other academics.
“We will not actively promote any political view beyond our founding principles so as to remain inclusive of people of all types of different ideological persuasion,” he said.
“Those founding principles are fundamentally about free inquiry in teaching research, artistic expressions, speech, intellectual diversity, the type of diversity that lots of statements about diversity don’t often include,” he said.
‘A State of Almost Permanent Hostility’
He highlighted decolonisation, which some argue has no concrete definition apart from that it “seeks to rewrite academic curricula as well as reorder the university as an institution, in the name of making them more ‘inclusive.’”“But it’s rooted in a very ‘Manichean West versus the rest’ dichotomy, which views almost anything Western as irredeemably colonial and ignoring the extremely varied extent to which various parts of the West at different times in history, were involved in the business of global empire building,” he said.
“This movement, I think, has been quite frequently informed by other developments in critical race theory which essentially posits irreconcilable divides between groups defined in racial terms, and there’s such a state of almost permanent hostility, arguing often, practically all white people are racist, almost by definition,” he added.
“From those perspectives, decolonisation often amounts to a radical attack on most forms of Western knowledge, culture, science, and so on,” he said.
Mr. Pace said that such arguments have been used often to try and “literally drive classical music out of the curriculum, viewed as little more than an expression of a colonial perspective.”
He also explained the introduction in various institutions of “censorious policies” relating to views on transgender or transsexual identity.
He said that such policies attempt to “declare invalid” the view of gender critical people, who believe there’s a fundamental difference between biological sex and gender identity, whether they be in changing rooms, prisons, refuges, or sports games.
Courage
When asked how much courage it takes to speak out in academic fields, he said that it “can be very difficult for junior academics, some of whom have only got temporary contracts, and who desperately needed to get more permanent employment.”“I think it’s particularly hard in narrow small fields where there’s only a few people involved, because if you write an article, where there’s probably only say, five, six, seven other people working on that area, almost certainly one of them will end up being one of the ones peer-reviewing it. And if you have flatly contradicted what they might have written on it, then that can cause a problem,” he said.
However, he added that not saying all peer reviewers do that as there “are very principled ones who can accept major challenges to their own work as long as they are properly formulated.”
Self-Censorship
He added it’s frequently the case that self-censorship happens, adding that he was worried that academia is moving away from scholarly “self-regulation towards ideological self-regulation.”“And in some ways, it could move it closer to the situations of scholarship in, say, communist Eastern Europe,” he added.
Mulling why cancel culture has grown over recent years, he said that the growth of postmodern thinking, which dates back to the early 20th century, had key texts come about in the 1970s, but they really grew in influence in the 1990s.
He said that in the period to the end of the Cold War, “faith in the possibility of a radically different type of society was lost by many on the left” after seeing not just the collapse of the system, but “just the level of jubilation by many of the people in Eastern Europe who are freed from these terrible, in my view, terrible regimes.”
“And so they focused their attentions elsewhere,” he added.
