A Harvard professor who spent 40 years teaching at the Ivy League institution blasted the university for the changes it made after the Chinese coronavirus and George Floyd riots, citing woke, anti-white and anti-male resolutions in a searing essay announcing his retirement.
Professor James Hankins explained that his decision to retire was “not a sudden one,” and was made in the fall of 2021, after having “endured almost two years” of Harvard’s rules related to the coronavirus, which he called “tyrannous invasions of private life.”
The history professor added that his decision to leave the Ivy League school also came after it “had collectively taken a knee” in response to the George Floyd riots, which he said had “serious consequences” for the way Harvard conducted its graduate admissions process moving forward.
“In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020, I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program,” Hankins wrote in his essay, titled, “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” published in Compact Magazine on Monday.
“In past years, this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool,” the professor continued. “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.’”
Hankins then cited another example in which a “certifiably brilliant” student whom he asserted was “literally the best” at the university — who “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 professor wrote, adding, “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,” he continued. “The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female.” In other words, a woman pretending to be a white man was the only acceptable white male applicant in the eyes of woke universities.
Hankins also noted that Harvard’s “two-book standard” — requiring faculty to publish at least two books to prove expertise in a subject area — was axed in the late 1990s, due to “feminist activists” who demanded that “half of all new appointments” at the university be women.
In order to achieve “equality,” it was required that “standards be lowered,” the professor explained, noting that women previously made up less than 10 percent of PhDs in history.
“Feminists denied vociferously that this was happening,” he said. “The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship.”
Hankins added that he and others who opposed the new requirement were deemed “sexists.”
“Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty,” the professor said. “The dynamic was similar to Congress voting to restrain its own spending.”
Changes at Harvard, Hankins said, are part of “the reason why the younger generation finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation.”
“When late liberal pedagogy replaced Western civilization courses with global history, serious harm was done to the socialization of young Americans,” he added. “When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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