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.

“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 generally quite well-meaning people, but on the whole not with brave people, not people who are willing to follow the truth wherever it leads”.

Growing backlash among academia

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

Last summer, academics at Royal Holloway’s music department wrote an open letter claiming managers planned to cut staff by 25 per cent as part of efforts to make the music curriculum more “integrated” and “broader”.

In March, under pressure to “decolonise” music, professors at the University of Oxford branded musical notation “colonialist” as part of proposals to change the current curriculum’s “complicity in white supremacy”.

Faculty documents showed that scholars felt the classical repertoire taught at Oxford, including Mozart and Beethoven, focused too much on “white European music from the slave period”.