Harvard Professor Blasts ‘Exclusion Of White Males’ In Scathing Public Resignation
(Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
A longtime Harvard history professor is publicly criticizing the university’s approach to hiring, admissions, and curriculum, saying the Ivy League institution has abandoned merit, failed to confront antisemitism, and retreated from teaching Western civilization.
James Hankins, who taught at Harvard for four decades, laid out his concerns in a recent Compact Magazine essay titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard.” He said his decision to depart was driven largely by what he described as the university’s embrace of race- and gender-based preferences that fundamentally altered academic decision-making.
According to Hankins, the shift accelerated in 2020, when the university “collectively took a knee” following the death of George Floyd. What he initially viewed as symbolic gestures, he said, soon had concrete effects on admissions and hiring.
While reviewing graduate applications that fall, Hankins said he encountered a candidate who would previously have been a clear top choice. Instead, he was informally told by a member of the admissions committee that admitting a white male “was not happening this year.” He wrote that similar practices appeared widespread across elite universities after he consulted colleagues elsewhere.
“The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males,” Hankins wrote, “had begun life as a female.”
Hankins said his concerns deepened in 2023 when Harvard, in his view, failed to respond adequately to antisemitism on campus, which he described as showing a “shocking indifference.” He also criticized the university’s COVID-era policies, arguing they reflected an unquestioning acceptance of official scientific authority and enabled excessive intrusions into private life.
Beyond these issues, Hankins warned that Harvard has long neglected its responsibility to teach Western civilization as a core subject. He argued that replacing Western civilization courses with global history has harmed students’ civic and cultural development.
“When you don’t teach the young what civilization is,” Hankins wrote, “people become uncivilized.” He added that Western history at Harvard appears to be “phased out or allowed to die on the vine.”
Hankins contrasted American academic trends with history education in China, where national identity and patriotism are openly reinforced. In the United States, he argued, Western history is often framed primarily as something to criticize or dismantle. In the hands of what he called “hyper-progressive” scholars, he said, global history can become actively anti-Western.
He traced Harvard’s decline back to the 1990s, when the university faced growing pressure to increase the number of women on its faculty. At the time, Hankins noted, women represented a small fraction of history PhDs, particularly in the mid-career pool from which Harvard typically hired. As a result, he said, standards were lowered to meet demographic goals.
Hankins announced that he will continue his academic career at the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He praised the program for remaining committed to teaching Western civilization and for welcoming students and faculty who, he said, are often excluded from elite universities due to identity-based criteria.
“It should by now be evident why Harvard and its ‘peer’ institutions do not offer fertile ground for a revival of the Western tradition,” Hankins wrote. While many fear that Western civilization is in decline, he concluded, few established institutions are willing to take the steps needed to preserve it.
For now, Hankins argued, meaningful reform in higher education may depend not on transforming existing universities, but on building new institutions free from what he described as entrenched ideological corruption and self-loathing.
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