A long-serving history professor at Harvard University, who dedicated four decades to teaching at the esteemed institution, has decided to part ways with the Ivy League school. His departure comes with a sharp critique of the university’s current environment.
In an article titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard” published in Compact Magazine, Professor James Hankins revealed his decision to leave the university in 2021, citing a wave of woke culture and stringent COVID-19 measures. However, he fulfilled a four-year retirement agreement, which concluded recently.
“We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime,” Hankins noted in his piece. He described it as a form of emergency governance that closely resembled the nation’s unquestioning faith in science, leading to what he saw as oppressive intrusions into personal life when backed by governmental power.
Hankins criticized the university for requiring professors to teach with masks and conduct seminars via Zoom, practices he felt conflicted with his educational principles.
History professor James Hankins spent 40 years at Harvard University. (Sophie Park/Bloomberg)
Hankins also referenced the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020, which sparked widespread protests. He described Harvard’s response, initially anticipated as mere “empty virtue-signaling,” but claimed it evolved into something more troubling, alleging that policies discriminating against White men in graduate admissions were put in place.
“In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program,” wrote Hankins. “In past years this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool. In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that ‘that’ (meaning admitting a white male) was ‘not happening this year.’”
He described another instance of an even higher caliber student — one who had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate and had the highest overall academic record of anyone in his class and whom Hankins described as “certifiably brilliant” — being rejected by every Harvard graduate program to which he applied.
“He too was a white male,” Hankins wrote. “I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected. Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours.
“The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female,” he continued.
A Harvard spokesperson affirmed, as Hankins wrote in his piece, that graduate admissions are faculty-led and localized at the department level.
But Hankins, who has now taken a role as a visiting professor at the University of Florida, didn’t just critique the school over these particular examples. He also described how, during his 40-year tenure at the school, the history department, harangued by activists, has lowered academic standards and all but abandoned the Western canon and Western history alike.
The Trump administration announced it was freezing over $2 billion in grants and contracts after Harvard University said it would not comply with federal demands regarding antisemitism. (Reuters/Nicholas Pfosi)
He explained that senior academic appointments at Harvard before the 1990s followed a “two-book standard. Appointees were expected to have published two books, one typically a graduate or doctoral dissertation republished as a book, and another showcasing the academic’s expertise on a given subject, before their appointments.
“The two-book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty,” he wrote. “Feminist activists, at Harvard as elsewhere, were demanding that half of all new appointments be women. That, they claimed, was what liberal standards of equality required.”
The feminist push had a devastating effect in the history department, according to Hankins.
“Since at the time women formed less than 10 percent of PhDs in history and were even rarer in the mid-career cohorts from which Harvard tended to hire, equality required that standards be lowered. Feminists denied vociferously that this was happening,” he wrote.
“The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship,” wrote Hankins, later adding that he and others who opposed the new order were labeled “sexists.”
Anti-Israel activists gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 14, 2023. (Joseph Prezioso / AFP)
When the school began focusing on “global civilizations” and “transnational history” rather than Western civilization in the classroom, the disaffected professor fought back. He guided a two-semester course requirement that would first teach students about Western civilization, and then integrate non-Western civilization into their body of historical knowledge.
That program was short-lived, lasting only through the early 2000s, when Hankins described continued and more rapid decline in academic standards.
“Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty,” he wrote. “The dynamic was similar to Congress voting to restrain its own spending. At one point we took a vow to curb promotions at 20 percent, then 50 percent. After that, there emerged an expectation that junior faculty would be promoted in the course of nature so long as they could get a book-length manuscript, or maybe a few really strong chapters, ready for publication in time for a tenure review.”
He described these newer and less qualified promotees as “left-leaning,” and said that “countervailing winds” at the university ushered in an institutional globalization, including more foreign students and the continued dwindling of Western history courses.
James Hankins said Harvard has lowered its academic standards.
“‘Transnational history’ meant that Europeanists would no longer teach the internal history of European nations—no more courses on the German Reformation, Elizabethan England, or the French Revolution,” he said. “Rather they would teach about interactions between Europe and the non-European world.”
Hankins later remarked that while professors of other history courses, like Chinese history, taught the jingoistic Chinese patriotism and the country’s long and successful struggle against a colonial and suffocating West.
However, such pride was not to be broached in Western history classes.
“Western global history, by contrast, displays no loyalty to Western societies or traditions; quite the contrary,” he wrote. “In the hands of hyper-progressive (or ‘woke’) practitioners, Western global history is often, indeed, actively anti-Western. Older Western societies are presented as inherently illiberal, to be contrasted unfavorably with the perfectly liberal society promised by the prophets of the progressive future.”
Hankins concluded that he has little hope for reform in what he calls “Ivy-Plus” institutions.
“For those like myself, however, who have lived through the decline of higher education in ‘elite’ universities, that would be a triumph of hope over experience, as Johnson said of remarriage. For now, a better hope lies in building new institutions unencumbered by the corruption and self-hatred that infect the old.”
