Featured Article: "Why I'm Leaving Harvard"

The history of Western civilization is vanishing from college campuses. At least that is what one former Harvard professor is proclaiming.
 

A recent article written by James Hankins explains his departure from Harvard after forty years as a professor of history. Hankins chronicles his years as a professor and the circumstances that ultimately led him to begin the retirement process in 2021, culminating in his retirement at the end of 2025. His reasons for leaving Harvard vary, but Hankins points to two central catalysts: the COVID-era intrusions into private life and teaching, and the earlier “Summer of Floyd,” which ushered in a period of aggressive university virtue-signaling that reshaped admissions and campus affairs. He is likely not alone. 
 

However, Hankins’s story runs deeper. Hankins notes that he is the ninth history professor to have left the university, either through retirement, death, or departure for other universities, exposing an alarming fact: Harvard has not promoted nor hired a historian in a Western field since 2012. Harvard’s move away from promoting the teaching of Western history is the straw that broke the camel’s back for Hankins and his decision to ultimately leave the university in favor of Florida’s upstart Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Hankins explains, “To be clear, I’m not leaving Harvard because of free-speech issues or politicization issues. It’s just that I’m very deeply committed to the revitalization of Western history, the study of Western civilization, which is not something I can do at Harvard.”
 

Harvard’s move away from the Western canon has been years in the making. 

In the mid-1990s, Hankins cites the trend in academic history toward “globalization,” a trend that has continued to the present day at Harvard University—and in higher education more broadly. Instead of courses on Western civilization, Harvard pushed for history professors to teach “transnational history.”
 

‘Transnational history’ meant that Europeanists would no longer teach the internal history of European nations—no more courses on the German Reformation, Elizabethan England, or the French Revolution. Rather they would teach about interactions between Europe and the non-European world. That meant the study of colonial empires or international trade networks or comparative economic development. International history replaced the diplomatic history of the United States.

While the study of international history is not the problem in and of itself, its replacement of Western civilization courses eventually paved the way for a gutting of Western history at Harvard. Hankins points to the 2010s as more of a problem era, during which time “you started hearing people say that we cannot teach Western history at all because it’s bad, it’s white-supremacist. It will infect the minds of our students.” Many colleges and universities have fallen prey—because of incentivization or simply because of conformity—to the deliberate shift in appeasing activist and ideologically rigid factions within higher education. It is not surprising then that as multicultural frameworks gained influence, teaching the foundations of Western civilization increasingly came to be framed as exclusionary—or outright racist—on the grounds that it centered on “dead white men.”
 

The absence of Western civilization is not a shock to those who monitor higher education trends. 
 

The National Association of Scholars published a report in 2011 titled The Vanishing West, which traces the decline and near-extinction of the Western Civilization history survey course in America’s top colleges and universities from 1964 to 2010. The Vanishing West points to the same phenomenon Hankins experienced at Harvard, the push toward globalization over teaching Western civilization. Of the 50 institutions the report surveyed, 20 percent required Western civilization courses, while the other 80 percent at least made students familiar with Western history in 1964. By 2010, none of the 50 institutions required Western civilization courses, and only 34 percent offered courses available on the topic. 
 

The dwindling ranks of Western civilization professors should raise huge alarm bells for those concerned about the future of higher education and the longevity of Western civilization. When institutions consciously choose to let Western history instruction die out in favor of more globalist or ideologized history fields, it is no wonder that students graduate without basic civic knowledge or understanding of the West. 
 

This is a topic to explore further in the coming days and one to closely monitor if we want to preserve our civilization.  
 

Until next week.

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