Professor James Hankins decided to retire from Harvard University in 2021, and now he’s shredding the school on his way out the door.
Hankins waited out a four-year retirement contract that finally ended several weeks ago. Now, he’s unleashing a scathing op-ed that calls out the school’s “strict COVID regime” and wokeness, something the right has been warning about for years.
“Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I have been a history professor for forty years. My four decades of experience at one of the world’s leading universities have given me a unique vantage point to trace the replacement of Western history by global history,” the professor writes. “This change is part of the reason why the younger generation finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation.”
“My decision to retire was not a sudden one. I am coming to the end of a four-year retirement contract that I signed in the fall of 2021. That year I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime,” Hankins added. “This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country’s uncritical acceptance of The Science and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education.”
He recalled the “Summer of Floyd” and the “serious consequences” that it had on how Harvard would conduct business in the future.
“In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. 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 revealed.
And it wasn’t the only time Hankins would encounter such injustice that year.
“In the same year a certifiably brilliant undergraduate I had tutored, who was literally the best student at Harvard—he won the prize for the graduating senior with the best overall academic record—was rejected from all the graduate programs to which he applied. He too was a white male,” the piece detailed. “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.”
But the degradation of American universities didn’t begin with the death of George Floyd, Hankins recalled. In his 40 year history as an educator at Harvard, he had seen higher education gradually turn away from Western history thanks to whining activists.
He pointed out that senior academic appointments for the school in the 1990s had largely followed the “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. 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,” he recounted, claiming that this did irreparable harm to the department to which he dedicated so much of his life.
“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,” Hankins said. “The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship.”
Those who failed to adopt the sudden change in orthodoxy without question were labeled “sexists,” and from here, the department became increasingly focused on “global civilizations” and “transnational history” as opposed to Western history lessons. He would go on to watch educational standards degrade further from there, despite his best efforts.
“Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty,” the piece continued. “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.”
While universities like Harvard were leaning heavily into subjects that shilled anything other than Western history, Hankins noted some important differences that were ignored.
“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,” Fox News reported.
“Western global history, by contrast, displays no loyalty to Western societies or traditions; quite the contrary,” Hankins pointed out. “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.”
Unfortunately, Hankins doesn’t see a future in which Harvard and other far-left campuses make their way back to traditional education. The only alternative, he says, is building something entirely new.
“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.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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