40-year Harvard professor pens scathing piece on school's 'exclusion of white males,' anti-Western trends
James Hankins said admissions committee told him accepting White male applicant was 'not happening this year'
……Then, Hankins referenced the 2020 "Summer of Floyd," when violent riots broke out nationwide after George Floyd died at the hands of police in Minneapolis. He said the university's response, which he thought would amount to "empty virtue-signaling," turned out to be much more sinister, suggesting that discrimination against White men in graduate admissions became policy.
"In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program," wrote Hankins. "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.'"
He described another instance of an even higher caliber student — one who had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate and had the highest overall academic record of anyone in his class and whom Hankins described as "certifiably brilliant" — being rejected by every Harvard graduate program to which he applied.
"He too was a white male," Hankins wrote. "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," he continued.
Harvard spokesperson affirmed, as Hankins wrote in his piece, that graduate admissions are faculty-led and localized at the department level.
But Hankins, who has now taken a role as a visiting professor at the University of Florida, didn't just critique the school over these particular examples. He also described how, during his 40-year tenure at the school, the history department, harangued by activists, has lowered academic standards and all but abandoned the Western canon and Western history alike.
…."Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty," he wrote. "The dynamic was similar to Congress voting to restrain its own spending. At one point we took a vow to curb promotions at 20 percent, then 50 percent…
He described these newer and less qualified promotees as "left-leaning," and said that "countervailing winds" at the university ushered in an institutional globalization, including more foreign students and the continued dwindling of Western history courses.
"'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," he said. "Rather they would teach about interactions between Europe and the non-European world."
Hankins later remarked that while professors of other history courses, like Chinese history, taught the jingoistic Chinese patriotism and the country's long and successful struggle against a colonial and suffocating West.
However, such pride was not to be broached in Western history classes.
"Western global history, by contrast, displays no loyalty to Western societies or traditions; quite the contrary," he wrote. "In the hands of hyper-progressive (or 'woke') practitioners, Western global history is often, indeed, actively anti-Western. Older Western societies are presented as inherently illiberal, to be contrasted unfavorably with the perfectly liberal society promised by the prophets of the progressive future."
Hankins concluded that he has little hope for reform in what he calls "Ivy-Plus" institutions…
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