A history professor who taught at Harvard University for 40 years left the Ivy League school for better opportunities, leaving with sharp criticism of the state of the school.
In an article titled “Why I Left Harvard” published in Compact magazine, history professor James Hankins said that amid a series of awakenings and COVID-19 restrictions, he decided to leave Harvard in 2021, but he fulfilled a four-year retirement contract that expired a few weeks ago.
“We have just spent nearly two years under rigorous COVID-19 management at universities,” Hankins wrote. “It is a form of emergency governance that reflects the faults of the entire country’s uncritical acceptance of Science and its propensity for brutal intrusions into private lives backed by public power.”
He added that the school forced professors to wear masks to teach and hold seminars via Zoom, which was inconsistent with his view of education.
History professor James Hankins has taught at Harvard University for 40 years.
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Hankins then mentioned the “Summer of Floyd” in 2020, when violent unrest broke out across the country after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. He said he thought the university’s response amounted to “empty virtue signaling,” but it turned out to be much more sinister, suggesting that discrimination against whites in graduate admissions had become policy.
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“While reviewing graduate applicants for the fall 2020 class, I discovered an outstanding candidate who would be a perfect fit for our program,” Hankins wrote. “In past years, this candidate would have immediately risen to the top of the applicant pool. However, in 2021, a member of the admissions committee informed me informally that ‘that situation’ (meaning admitting a white male) ‘was not going to happen this year.'”
He described another example of a better student—who entered Harvard as an undergraduate with the highest overall academic record of any student in his class, and whom Hankins described as “outstanding”—who was rejected by every Harvard graduate program he applied to.
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“He is also a white male,” Hankins wrote. “I called friends at several colleges to find out why he was rejected. It was the same story everywhere: Graduate admissions committees across the country have been following the same unspoken protocols that we have.
“The one exception I’ve found to the general rejection of white men is starting life as a woman,” he continued.
As Hankins wrote in his article, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed that graduate admissions is faculty-led and localized at the departmental level.
But Hankins, now a visiting professor at the University of Florida, doesn’t just criticize the school for these specific examples. He also described how during his 40-year tenure at the school, the history department, encouraged by activists, lowered academic standards and all but abandoned the Western classics and Western history.
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He explained that prior to the 1990s, senior academic appointments at Harvard followed a “two-book standard.” Appointees are expected to publish two books prior to appointment, one of which is usually a graduate or doctoral thesis republished as a book and another demonstrating the scholar’s expertise on a specific topic.
“The two-book standard was shelved in the late 1990s, when we faced increasing pressure to hire more female faculty,” he writes. “Feminist activists at Harvard and elsewhere are demanding that half of all new appointments be women. This, they claim, is what the liberal equality standard requires.”
Hankins said the feminist push had a devastating impact on the history department.
“Since women historically accounted for less than 10 percent of Ph.D.s at the time, and were even rarer among the mid-career groups Harvard tends to hire, equality required lowering standards. Feminists vehemently denied that this was happening,” he wrote.
“The real problem, they said, was men’s inability to properly evaluate women’s academic achievements,” Hankins wrote, later adding that he and others who opposed the new order were labeled “sexists.”
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When the school began focusing on “global civilization” and “transnational history” instead of Western civilization in classes, the disgruntled professor fought back. He directed a two-semester course requirement that first taught students about Western civilization and then integrated non-Western civilization into their historical knowledge.
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The program was short-lived, lasting only until the early 2000s, when Hankins described a continued and faster decline in academic standards.
“Soon, the department was promoting an increasing proportion of junior faculty,” he writes. “This dynamic is similar to Congress voting to limit its own spending. At one point, we vowed to limit promotions to 20 percent, then 50 percent. After that, people began to expect that as long as junior faculty could get a book-length manuscript, or maybe some really strong chapters, published in time for tenure review, they would automatically be promoted.”
He described these new, less qualified promotions as “leaning to the left” and said the university’s “headwinds” had ushered in institutional globalization, including more foreign students and the continued decline of Western history courses.
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James Hankins says Harvard has lowered academic standards.
“‘Transnational history’ means that Europeanists will no longer teach the internal history of European countries — no more courses on the German Reformation, Elizabethan England or the French Revolution,” he said. “Instead, they teach about the interaction between Europe and the non-European world.”
Hankins later commented that other history courses taught, such as Chinese history, taught a jingoistic version of Chinese patriotism and the country’s long and successful struggle against the colonial and stifling West.
However, this kind of pride has no place in Western history classes.
“Western global history, by contrast, does not demonstrate an allegiance to Western society or tradition; quite the contrary,” he writes. “In the hands of hyper-progressive (or ‘woke’) practitioners, Western global history has often been in fact actively anti-Western. Old Western societies are depicted as inherently illiberal, in stark contrast to the perfectly liberal societies promised by prophets of the progressive future.”
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Hankins concluded that he had little hope of reforming what he called the “Ivy+” institutions.
“However, for someone like me who has lived through the decline of ‘elite’ college higher education, it will be a triumph of hope over experience, as Johnson said of remarriage. For now, the better hope lies in building new institutions unencumbered by the corruption and self-hatred in the old ones.”
Original source of the article: Harvard professor, 40, writes scathing essay criticizing school’s “exclusion of white men” and anti-Western trends