Why I left academia
jpehs.co.uk
jpehs.co.uk
It's more than cancel culture, per title, though. It seems like the problem is our current morality is being considered to always be the best, the golden standard from which history must be judged by. Which is, of course, ridiculous, but I think it's deeper than that.
I think no one stops to think about what WE will be judged by in the future. No one likes to think they'll be our generation's slave owners, and in general, no one believes they do such atrocities current-day. Yet, we all rely on nearly slave labor, when we buy items from sweatshops (though this is "hard to avoid"). Or, we all economically support quasi-terrorist regimes, like Russia and China. Sure, we can't judge each other for that now. But can we do the same in 100 years? 250?
To be clear cancel culture over inconsequential stuff (like tweeting a tasteless joke when you were 14) is absolutely ridiculous. It matters the severity, context, and the time scale. Is it "cancel culture" to fire an employee for posting Confederate flags on their Facebook? What about a Nazi flag? Where's the distinction?
Yes and yes, and such firing would be considered illegal in a lot of places. It would be different if the employee made inappropriate comments at work or harassed other people, but you shouldn't go policing other's people out of work life. Evaluate employees by their job, not to protect the nazis, but to be fair to people irrespective of their gender or their race.
However, if you are talking about European music in Europe, and are sitting in a European university then what can you decolonize? The culture is the colonial power, if you remove the imperialism of it… aren’t you left with next to nothing?
Had the Spanish Armada not failed, the UK would likely have become a colony yet again.
When I went to school, we were taught the Brits were benign and flawless.
Imagine my surprise to learn that English still carries remnants of Britain’s history as a colonial backwater (e.g. cow vs beef).
Shouldn't the British children be taught about the atrocities committed by British because, if you talk to general British public, they think that the British Raj was benevolent & a very good thing happened to the Indian subcontinent.
Historical figures should be treated within academia in a holistic fashion, neither as heroes nor villains but as people who accomplished things.
Whether or not an act is good or evil is something that a history class shouldn’t seek to teach. That should be left up to either the minds of the students, or more pertinently to an ethics and philosophy class.
As someone who took the later, I must say I leaned more about good and evil in ethics classes than in history.
I have no clue where from his "decolonization" quotes are coming from. Is that supposed to be the general attitude towards music in UK universities?
> Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.
This is what you'll find written in Introduction to Music textbook at most UK unis? No? What is it then?
I realize the author is writing his blog for his own audience. But this story of some hinted-at, vast struggle between him and cancel-culture in the field of musicology is totally unknown to me.
> But 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. Now, too many humanities scholars move in lock step with the general ideology of our time, dogmatically echoing the opinions of politicians, the media, and business
My impression is that is exactly what postcolonial approach to musicology does. Maybe it's getting worse as humanities are being underfunded in general.
> Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.
Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised. The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge. A critical statement – one that better represents the ideal of scholarship, and of undergraduate and postgraduate education, in my view – would read something more like the following.
Nineteenth-century musical works were written during the period of empire, and they carry that history within them. But as well as being part of the imperial world in which they appeared, they are also musical works. As with a protest song written at the time of the Vietnam war (which fell during the US’s imperial epoch), a piece of classical music is simultaneously imbued with the history of its own time and also minimally separated from it as a partially autonomous object. As with a protest song, there therefore exists the possibility that it could offer a form of critique of existing social conditions. There is also the possibility that works of this kind will affirm the existing social conditions. What actually transpires in the music itself is therefore determinative of the question whether we can judge it to be for or against anything in particular. An outcome of the first, dogmatic statement could be that music departments stop teaching music by Beethoven, Wagner, and co., in the (frankly insane) belief that doing so will somehow materially improve current living conditions for the economically, socially, sexually, religiously, or racially underprivileged. > (end of quote)
What he describes as the correct way of interpreting the history of music IS IN FACT WHAT “DECOLONIZING” THE CURRICULUM WOULD INVOLVE. The broad framework means looking beyond the canonization of great composers into the social and political role they inhabited, and being willing to give a hard look to people once simply beatified as “greats.” It doesn’t mean NOT teaching Beethoven, and nowhere can he find an actual example of a curriculum “canceling” Beethoven except in his thought experiment.
I have noticed that people who complain about “critical race theory,” etc. seem not to recognize that re-examining history and culture is about adding to the sum total of human knowledge, not subtracting—restoring the perspectives of people whose lives and histories were purposefully left out of the historical record for centuries, and trying to get a more accurate view as a result.
I can't wait to decolonize mathematics, physics, etc. and banish those arbitrary colonialists laws such as the law of gravitation, thermodynamics etc.
https://theconversation.com/yes-mathematics-can-be-decolonis...
The most actionable suggestion in the article was that students should use math to critically analyse society, which isn't really the subject of a mathematical education, but rather applied math / economics. Personally, I think a much better (personally and socially useful) field to apply / practice math is engineering, physics, or computing / data science. But in any case, that is a minor part of math education, IME.
Who is some? Who is making this argument? Why do reporters use this nebulous nobody/everybody instead of directly stating who makes these kinds of statements.
"Ah yes, I remember the person who argued this. It was a right wing nationalist who went on to kill several people, right?"
Media does it: and it is strong editorial policy/media market preference, because it allows a stronger, more emotionally engaging narrative to be crafted without literal untruth.
People associate “engagement” with new/social media, but old media has been about it for centuries, just with less precise analytics.
Edit: sorry, I confused the original blog post of the professor with the news article.
The irony, of course, is that his blog post starts with talking about how he was an outsider, etc. If it wasn’t for the “cancel culture” of the past, that canceled people and rules that insisted that academia and other higher pursuits must only be available to people of a certain class, he himself would not have been able to ever enter academia.
There may be elements of cancel culture that are bad. It may also be the worst thing in the history of this planet. But nothing in this individual’s blog post and reasoning suggests that’s the case.
> He said that music departments could stop teaching Beethoven and Wagner because their compositions were produced during a time of empire “in the frankly insane belief that doing so will somehow materially improve current living conditions for the economically, socially, sexually, religiously, or racially underprivileged”.
They're never going to stop teaching Beethoven and Wagner and it sincerely sounds like he's misunderstanding the goals with most music departments' changes. On the other hand, there _are_ genuine issues with how music theory and history are taught today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
He's a professor of music history and theory. He edits a book series called "Music in Context". He's written about homosexuality in the world of opera. He doesn't seem like at outright conservative reactionary and I'd really like to understand what his grievances with his department are.