James Hankins, a professor of History at Harvard, writes:
* 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.” In the same year a certifiably brilliant undergraduate I had tutored, who was literally the best student at Harvard—he 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. 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.
* We have not hired with tenure a historian in a Western field—ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern—in a decade; the last promotion to tenure from the junior ranks occurred in 2012. A couple of short-term post-doctoral lecturers have come and gone. As has now become common practice in academe, ancient history has been outsourced to the Classics department. Meanwhile, the department has lost eight senior historians in Western fields—all major figures—through death, retirement, or departure for other universities. I will be the ninth, and I am not expecting to be replaced.
* I remember the word “problematic,” now universally used in academe as a synonym for undesirable, being derided as a “Princeton term.”
* In that period, teaching was a low priority, but colleagues were more frank about neglecting it than they are now. Another of my mentors, the Russianist Ned Keenan, who had once served as dean of the graduate school, was famous for his declaration at a full faculty meeting that “this faculty does not choose to have its research priorities dictated by the intellectual interests of 18-year olds.” This statement was greeted with rapturous applause. Translated, it meant that teaching your next book was more valuable to the institution than providing basic courses and surveys for undergraduates. These unpleasant tasks could be unloaded on junior faculty and temporary instructors. Too much interest in pedagogy was seen as a sign of waning success in one’s research field or of a servile attitude to university administrators, who were always going on about teaching standards, advising, grade inflation, and things of that sort.
In the Harvard of the 1980s, senior faculty also tended to keep their juniors at arm’s length. When I was tenured in 1992, I was advised not to associate too closely with the untenured. It was Harvard’s practice not to promote junior faculty but to send them out to the provinces to win reputation before returning in glory to Harvard. Too close a relationship with junior faculty was likely to end painfully. I was in fact an anomaly: the first junior professor to be promoted from within for over two decades. Senior appointments at Harvard in the ’80s and early ’90s observed the “two-book” standard. It was expected that the first book would be a published version of the dissertation. The second was supposed to be a “field-defining book.” This was a book that everyone in the candidate’s subfield had to read and that would go immediately onto graduate reading lists—the books read by doctoral candidates when preparing fields for examination. The candidate for promotion, in other words, had to have at least the beginnings of a national reputation. As my late Harvard colleague Mark Kishlansky used to remark: “When a new senior appointment at Harvard is announced, what you expect to hear is, ‘Not him!’ What you don’t want to hear is, ‘Who?’”
The two-book standard would be shelved in the later 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty.
* We had acquired the reputation as a “baseball-cap concentration,” meaning that those with intellectual ambitions went elsewhere, chiefly to the hybrid concentration called History and Literature, which had more cachet and more women. The History Department decided that, to sex itself up, it needed a thorough redesign of its curriculum. We designed all new tutorials, emphasizing the arts of historical writing and research. Senior faculty would teach small groups of undergraduates, a practice previously unheard of. I was the chair of the reform committee charged with making these changes.
What caused the most controversy was my maneuvering to require a term of Western civilization, to be followed by a term of “global civilizations,” forming a two-semester required sequence.
* With more women on the faculty, we also became a more nurturing department. Every junior hire was assigned a senior mentor, and we received credit in our annual reports to the dean for the number of junior faculty and others that we “mentored.” (My objections to using the word as a verb were not heeded.)
