Harvard Abandons Western Civilization for Global History Courses

A history professor who taught at Harvard University for 40 years has left the Ivy League but wrote a scathing piece on his way out.

In a piece titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” published in Compact Magazine, history professor James Hankins said he decided in 2021 to leave the school amid wokeness and COVID restrictions, but honored a four-year retirement contract that expired just weeks ago.

“We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime,” Hankins wrote. “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.”

He added that the school forced professors to lecture wearing masks and give seminars via Zoom, which didn’t align with his views on education.

The article is worth reading. Harvard has replaced US History with Global History and surrendered to DEI:

The year earlier, the university had collectively taken a knee during the Summer of Floyd. This turned out not to be empty virtue-signalling, as I expected, but had serious consequences for the way we conducted our affairs. 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.” 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.

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.

This is what the globalists are planning throughout the school systems. They are going global and abandoning Western Civilization.

Standards Were Lowered for the Female Activists

He said standards were lowered to hire females in the history department. Hankins said it had a devastating effect in 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.

“The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship,” wrote Hankins, later adding that he and others who opposed the new order were labeled “sexists.”

When the school began focusing on “global civilizations” and “transnational history” rather than Western civilization in the classroom, he fought back, but his battle was shortly lost.

Hankins said the DEI promotions increased, and the less qualified promotes were “left-leaning,” and the “countervailing winds” ushered in an institutional globalization, including foreign students, and the further dwindling of Western history courses.