A veteran Harvard professor has publicly exposed the university’s systematic rejection of white male applicants and its deliberate abandonment of Western civilization education after spending four decades at the institution.
History Professor James Hankins documented his decision to leave in a Compact magazine essay, describing how America’s premier university descended into ideological corruption across multiple dimensions.
The College Fix reports that during fall 2020 graduate admissions reviews, Hankins identified an exceptional candidate perfectly suited for the program. In previous years, this applicant would have immediately risen to the top. However, an admissions committee member informed him that admitting a White male was “not happening this year.”
That same year, a certifiably brilliant undergraduate Hankins had tutored won the prize for best overall academic record at Harvard. Despite being literally the finest student at the university, this scholar faced rejection from every graduate program where he applied. He too was a white male. Hankins contacted colleagues at multiple universities seeking explanations for the rejections. The answer proved identical everywhere. Graduate admissions committees nationwide had been following the same unspoken protocol. The single exception to this general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female.
Real Clear Politics reports Hankins also criticized Harvard’s embrace of globalism. “We have not hired with tenure a historian in a Western field — ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern — in a decade,” Hankins noted about his department, which “lost eight senior historians in Western fields — all major figures — through death, retirement or departure for other universities. I will be the ninth, and I am not expecting to be replaced.”
The damage extends beyond Harvard. “The replacement of Western history by global history” has done “serious harm … to the socialization of young Americans,” Hankins warned. “When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.”
Over 40 years, Hankins witnessed his profession shift focus from European civilization toward cultures previously deemed barbaric. “In this absurdist rendering of world history, Central Asian peoples,” for example, “are presented as the drivers of cultural innovation, spreading their benign influence east and west via the Silk Road.” This gets marketed as “‘de-centering the West,’ where Western countries are literally put in their place as an ugly growth on the back side of Eurasia.”
The New York Post reports Hankins also condemned Harvard’s COVID restrictions. The university’s “tyrannous invasions of private life” forced professors to lecture in masks and conduct seminars on Zoom, neither of which “accorded with my idea of liberal education.”
Hankins now teaches at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education, which remains committed to teaching Western civilization’s history. “For now, a better hope lies in building new institutions unencumbered by the corruption and self-hatred that infect the old,” he concluded.
