A distinguished history professor, who dedicated four decades to Harvard University, has departed the prestigious institution, leaving behind a scathing critique of its current state.
In his article "Why I'm Leaving Harvard," published in Compact Magazine, Professor James Hankins revealed his decision to exit the university in 2021, citing a surge of wokeness and stringent COVID-19 restrictions as pivotal factors. However, he honored a four-year retirement contract, which concluded only recently.
According to Fox News, Hankins expressed his discontent with the university's pandemic measures, stating, "We had just endured almost two years under the universitys strict Covid regime." He criticized the institution's adherence to what he described as "The Science" and its tendency to impose "tyrannous invasions of private life" when backed by public power.
The professor also lamented the requirement for faculty to lecture while masked and conduct seminars via Zoom, which clashed with his educational philosophy.
Hankins further criticized Harvard's response to the 2020 "Summer of Floyd," a period marked by nationwide riots following George Floyd's death at the hands of police in Minneapolis. He anticipated the university's reaction to be mere "empty virtue-signaling," but found it to be more insidious, suggesting that discrimination against White men in graduate admissions had become policy.
"In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program," Hankins recounted. "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.'"
Hankins shared another instance involving a highly qualified student, described as "certifiably brilliant," who was rejected by every Harvard graduate program he applied to, despite his exceptional academic record. "He too was a white male," Hankins noted. "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 professor observed that the only exception to this exclusion was a candidate who had transitioned from female to male.
A Harvard spokesperson confirmed, as Hankins mentioned in his piece, that graduate admissions are faculty-led and localized at the department level. However, Hankins, now a visiting professor at the University of Florida, did not limit his critique to these specific examples.
He also highlighted the decline in academic standards within the history department, which he attributed to activist pressure and a departure from the Western canon. He explained that prior to the 1990s, senior academic appointments at Harvard adhered to a "two-book standard," requiring appointees to have published two books 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," Hankins 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." According to Hankins, this feminist push had a detrimental impact on the history department.
"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.
Hankins recounted that those who opposed the new order were labeled "sexists." When the school shifted its focus to "global civilizations" and "transnational history" rather than Western civilization, Hankins resisted. He advocated for a two-semester course requirement that would first teach students about Western civilization, followed by an integration of non-Western civilization into their historical knowledge.
However, this program was short-lived, ending in the early 2000s as academic standards continued to decline.
"Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty," Hankins observed. "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," noting that "countervailing winds" at the university facilitated an institutional globalization, with an increase in foreign students and a continued decline in Western history courses.
"'Transnational history' meant that Europeanists would no longer teach the internal history of European nationsno more courses on the German Reformation, Elizabethan England, or the French Revolution," he explained. "Rather they would teach about interactions between Europe and the non-European world." Hankins remarked that while professors of other history courses, such as Chinese history, taught with a sense of national pride, Western history classes were devoid of such loyalty.
"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 with little optimism for reform within "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."
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