James Hankins said admissions committee told him accepting White male applicant was ‘not happening this year’ A history professor who taught at Harvard University for 40 years has left the Ivy League for greener pastures, penning a biting critique on the state of the school on his way out the door.
In a piece titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” published in Compact Magazine, history professor James Hankins said he decided in 2021 to leave the school amid a flurry of wokeness and COVID restrictions, but honored a four-year retirement contract that expired just weeks ago.
“We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime,” Hankins wrote. “This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country’s uncritical acceptance of The Science and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life.”
He added that the school forced professors to lecture wearing masks and give seminars via Zoom, which did not comport with his views on education.
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.
A 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.
This story reminds me of some things:
The Jacob Savage Parallel: Hankins’ specific claim about graduate admissions—that he was told admitting a white male was “not happening this year”—is essentially the academic version of Jacob Savage’s thesis in “The Vanishing White Male Writer.” Savage documented how literary agencies and publishers implicitly (or explicitly) closed the door on a specific demographic to correct historical imbalances. Hankins is describing the exact same mechanism occurring upstream in the credentialing phase (the PhD program) before those individuals even reach the professional market.
Sociology of “Status Closure“: I love Max Weber and Stephen Park Turner’s ideas on how groups monopolize resources and opportunities. Hankins’ description of the history department changing its tenure requirements (dropping the “two-book standard” to accommodate demographic goals) is a textbook example of altering the criteria of legitimacy. From a sociological perspective, this is a group redefining “merit” to ensure the social reproduction of a specific ideological cohort. The shift from “Western Civilization” to “Transnational History” functions similarly; it delegitimizes the old guard’s expertise and privileges the new entrants’ specific cultural capital.
The “Lost Generation” of Academics: Hankins mentions a “certifiably brilliant” student with the highest academic record who was rejected by every program. This directly echoes the “Lost Generation” concept in Savage’s work—the idea that there is a cohort of high-competence individuals who are being structurally filtered out of elite institutions. Hankins argues that this results in a “brain drain” where talent leaves the Ivy League for places like the University of Florida, potentially signaling the fracturing of elite consensus that authors like Niall Ferguson often discuss.
Institutional Capture: The article touches on themes Christopher Caldwell often explores regarding the way civil rights law and administrative policy (like the response to the “Summer of Floyd”) reshape institutions from the inside. Hankins describes a process where administrative fiat (admissions policies, COVID rules) overrides traditional faculty governance, effectively capturing the institution for a new political mission.
Here are a few ways America has crossed the rubicon.
1. The Shift from Implicit Bias to Explicit Policy: The most shocking detail in Hankins’ account is the admissions committee stating that accepting a white male was “not happening this year.”
In the framework of Jacob Savage’s “Lost Generation,” we often talk about “soft” exclusion—a drift in cultural tastes or a vague preference for new voices. But Hankins is describing hard exclusion. The Rubicon crossed here is the abandonment of the pretense of neutrality. When an institution feels confident enough to explicitly tell a senior professor that a specific demographic is categorically banned for a cycle, they are no longer operating under the old liberal model of “best man for the job.” They have moved to a model of explicit demographic engineering.
2. The Abandonment of Objective Merit (The “Two-Book Standard”): I love how groups manipulate rules to maintain power. Hankins’ description of the “two-book standard” being dropped is a perfect example of this.
In a functional meritocracy, standards are static, and people struggle to meet them. In the system Hankins describes, the standards were lowered specifically because the preferred demographic wasn’t meeting them. This crosses a Rubicon because it signals that ideological outcome is now more important than competence.
This connects directly to the “competence crisis” that authors like Mike Benz or Niall Ferguson might discuss. If Harvard stopped requiring two books because it was “exclusionary,” they fundamentally changed what a Harvard professor is. They are no longer selecting for the highest capacity for scholarship; they are selecting for the highest capacity for compliance with the new cultural regime.
3. The Caldwellian “Rival Constitution”: Christopher Caldwell argues that since the 1960s, the US has had two rival constitutions: the original one (based on liberty and procedural justice) and a new one (based on civil rights and outcome equality).
Hankins’ story suggests the “new constitution” has now fully conquered the History department. When he mentions that “Western global history” is now taught as “actively anti-Western,” it signals that the department is no longer interested in preserving or understanding the civilization that built the university. Instead, the department has become a tool to deconstruct that civilization.
The “Florida” Factor: There is one final “Rubicon” element here: Hankins leaving for the University of Florida.
For decades, the assumption was that the Ivies were the peak, and everything else was secondary. We are now seeing a geographic and ideological bifurcation. The fact that a 40-year Harvard veteran views a state school in the South as “greener pastures” suggests the prestige hierarchy is beginning to fracture. We may be entering an era where there is no longer a single “American Academy,” but rather two separate academic ecosystems with totally different values.
