Cambridge votes down appeal to save St John’s Voices
NewsFrom Varsity:
The Governing Body of St John’s College has rejected a motion requesting a re-evaluation of the decision to disband St John’s Voices choir.
This comes after the College Master, Heather Hancock, emailed all choir members in March informing them that the College would no longer be funding the choir, and that it would be disbanded at the end of Easter term.
…choir members have been campaigning to overturn the decision, seeking a re-evaluation. The formal motion was “heavily defeated” by College Fellows…
More here.
Another scandalous and arrogant piece of authoritarian dictatorship. If the sign on the college gates had said ‘UNIVERSITY OF ISLINGTON (FORMERLY ISLINGTON BORSTAL)’ then this policy would have been considered par for the course, being designed to eradicate the heritage of white-centric slave-owner-composed elitist non-diverse Christian music. But, coming as it does from a Cambridge University College, it should be ringing alarm bells.
But these bells are already tolling. Oxford and Cambridge have introduced ‘unconscious bias’ and race workshops for freshers, and the University of Bristol ‘has outlawed words such as ‘mankind’ ‘to avoid causing offence to students and staff’.
Taxpayers should be woke enough to realise that they are funding the purveyors of this drivel. We need to know, on the one hand, how much all the academics who run these workshops are being paid per annum, and, on the other, how much funding will be withdrawn from this choir. That will, at least, establish the College’s priorities.
We also need to know exactly how much taxpayers’ money is being shovelled into St John’s College. Could anyone provide these figures? Maybe a Freedom of Information request would provide the answers to these questions.
Perhaps a petition from the most illustrious alumni of St John’s College would persuade the benighted promulgators of this edict to issue the usual snivelling apology and reverse it; remember the BBC Singers debacle?
Finally, the decision by the Fellows of the College to axe the choir despite the offer of funding from generous donors is a clear sign that this is a political, not economic, imperative on their part. One of them is none other than the Prince of Wales…
It’s not about money, it’s Philistinism. That is now clear beyond doubt.
The Petition has nearly 15,000 signatures including a former Archbishop of Canterbury, a Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and one of the most well known and performed living Composer of Choral Music, and many Alumni. The College has not yet replied to the Open Letter which formed part of that Petition and has not provided any credible reason for its decision.
It is not interested in the criticism it has received from its Alumni, from distinguished former directors of Music or from anyone else. Any further Petition is unlikely to make the slightest difference.
How long will the main College Choir survive under the current regime? Why would the most talented young singers or Organists
apply to St John’s for Scholarships in the future?
Is there an opportunity for Judicial Review?
You think the Fellows of St. John’s have actually heard of any of those people?
What an ultra-right, snobbery-laden piece of nonsense!
Not mentioned that the disbandment was announced in the interregnum between Deans (deliberately? Sneakily??)