A history professor who taught at Harvard for 40 years is publicly accusing the Ivy League school of racially biased hiring and hiring policies, its “shocking indifference” to anti-Semitism and its undermining of its commitment to teaching students Western history.
James Hankins wrote an essay in Compact Magazine entitled “Why am I leaving Harvard?“that his decision was largely influenced by the school's refusal of merit in favor of diversity quotaswhich he said completely changed “the way we do our business,” leaving behind outstanding candidates unless they had Harvard's desired skin color or gender.
In 2020, Hankins said, “the university collectively took a knee during the Summer of Floyd.”
“This turned out to be not the empty virtue signaling that I expected, but had serious consequences for the way we conducted our affairs,” he wrote. “In the fall of 2020, while reviewing graduate student applicants, I came across an outstanding candidate who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years, this candidate would have immediately risen to the top of the applicant pool. However, in 2021, an admissions officer informally told me that 'that' (meaning the admission of a white male) 'wasn't going to happen this year.' (RELATED: These Medical Schools Can't Stop Racially Gerrymandering Their Students)
Hankins said such treatment is not limited to Harvard. After checking with his colleagues, he found that the same “unspoken protocol” was followed throughout the country.
“The only exception to the general exclusion of white men that I found is that they started life as women,” Hankins said.
Affirmative action supporters hold signs during a protest at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 1, 2023. (Photo by JOSEPH PRECIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
His concerns only deepened in 2023 when the university failed to properly address the problem anti-Semitismdescribing the university's attitude as “shocking indifference”.
Moreover, the facility's Covid protocols “incorrectly reflect the nation's uncritical acceptance of 'Science' and its penchant, backed by state power, for a tyrannical invasion of privacy,” Hankins added.
More broadly, Hankins warned that the university had for decades neglected its responsibility to teach Western civilization as a serious, fundamental subject, to the detriment of both students and society.
“When late liberal pedagogy replaced courses in Western civilization with courses in global history, the socialization of young Americans was seriously harmed. When you don't teach young people what civilization is, people become uncivilized,” Hankins wrote. “It is difficult to escape the impression that, through hostility or neglect, Western history is being phased out or allowed to die on the vine at Harvard.”
Hankins compared the way history is taught in China, where national identity and patriotism are openly reinforced, with the way it is taught in the United States, where Western history is often presented as something to be condemned or dismantled. “In the hands of hyper-progressive (or ‘woke’) practitioners, Western global history is often actively anti-Western indeed,” he wrote.
Harvard's fall, according to Hankins, began decades ago. In the 1990s, the university “came under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty” and was thus forced to abandon some of its long-held expectations.
“Since women made up less than 10 percent of PhDs in history at the time and were even rarer in the mid-career cohorts from which Harvard typically hired, equality required lowering standards,” the professor noted.
Hankins added that he is continuing his career at the University of Florida's Hamilton School of Classics and Civics, which he said remains “committed to teaching the history of Western civilization” and hosting “a terrible population of white males whose cross-scores were too low to qualify for jobs in outdated universities.”
“It should be obvious by now why Harvard and its Ivy-Plus peers do not offer fertile ground for a new flowering of courses in the Western tradition,” Hankins writes. “Many now believe that our civilization is on the brink of collapse, but few seem willing to take the steps necessary to preserve it.”
Even more destructive he concluded that while one can “hope” for change in America’s existing institutions of higher education, “the best hope for now lies in the creation of new institutions unencumbered by the corruption and self-loathing that infects the old ones.”
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