Anthony Freeling, Cambridge’s new acting vice-chancellor, has told Varsity he doesn’t know what decolonisation is.

In an interview in today’s paper, Stephen Toope’s short term replacement said that decolonisation “has been misused to such an extent that I don’t think, if I’m honest, I can give an accurate definition of what is meant by it.”

The admission comes at a delicate time for Freeling, who has sought in the last few weeks to balance courtesy for his controversy stricken predecessor with an admission of the need to turn the page on culture war debates.

Toope, who previously said that decolonising the curriculum holds “a lot of value”, set up the Cambridge advisory group on the legacies of slavery in 2019 which concluded last month that the University gained “significant benefits” from the slave trade.

Asked about the practice of decolonisation, Freeling said that since Cambridge is a university that is managed from the bottom up, “I cannot imagine frankly decolonisation discussion making such sense at governance level”.

The new vice-chancellor also described the reading week proposal as “an over-simplified solution”, but didn’t rule out the university trying it temporarily. He said: “The bigger issue I think is workload”.

Freeling also emphasised the importance of free speech, a point of frequent conflict during Toope’s term. The right-wing press often criticised Freeling’s predecessor over the issue, something Freeling alluded to himself when he said: “The Spectator’s take on some initiatives that I thought was just unfair personally.”

Freeling repeatedly said that the University should not limit its members’ speech, saying: “we must make clear people are free to speak about things that are lawfully allowed.”, adding that “I would feel quite horrified if people felt they could not say things.”

As reports of another suspected suicide at Cambridge circulate, Freeling played down his capacity to solve the increased demand in the university for mental health services, which have increased by 28%: “It’s easy for amateurs like me to tell simplistic narratives of this thing that made that thing happen. That is definitely over simplified and dangerously over simplified.

“It is absolutely a priority of my time and will remain one when Professor Prentice arrives.

“We need to find ways that we give our students the best opportunity to reach the help they need without the pretence that a set of amateurs can do that. We want to go to that next level, using true expertise. We are reaching out to them, not the amateurs. More to be done and we are doing it.”