McCARTHY: Harvard: ‘Yes’ to discrimination and ‘No’ to Western civilization

At Harvard University today, professors who teach Western history are history.  

James Hankins, a specialist in Renaissance thought, was one of the last holdouts.

Now Hankins, who has just published a hefty book that teaches what Harvard doesn’t — The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. Vol. 1 — has decamped for the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education.  

It’s not the warmer weather that’s drawn him away from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s the contrast in intellectual climates: Frozen and dead, where Western history is concerned, at Harvard; full of green shoots at the University of Florida.  
“We have not hired with tenure a historian in a Western field — ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern — in a decade,” Hankins says about his Harvard department, which in that time “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.”  

The loss isn’t just Harvard’s.

“The replacement of Western history by global history” has done “serious harm … to the socialization of young Americans,” the historian warns in Compact magazine.  “When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.”  

In the 40 years Hankins taught at Harvard, he saw his profession shift its focus from European civilization to cultures once considered barbarian.  

“In this absurdist rendering of world history, Central Asian peoples,” for example, “are presented as the drivers of cultural innovation, spreading their benign influence east and west via the Silk Road.”  

This is marketed as “‘de-centring the West,’ where Western countries are literally put in their place as an ugly growth on the back side of Eurasia.”  

Mongol hordes aren’t the only protagonists of the new history, however. Anyone who isn’t white qualifies.  

White students facing obstacles

A similar standard applies to elite graduate-school admissions, in Hankins’ experience. 

“I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee” in 2021, he recalls, that “admitting a white male … was ‘not happening this year.'”  

As for Harvard’s white male undergraduates, their skin colour and sex are obstacles to academic advancement.  

“(T)he 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,” the historian recounts.  

“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.”  
Could anyone get past this illegal discrimination?  

“The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female,” Hankins writes.  

Hankins was one of the mere 3% of Harvard faculty who identify as conservative.  

Yet even progressive scholars admit there’s a problem.  

Theda Skocpol, Harvard’s Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, is nobody’s idea of a conservative.  

In a recent interview published with the journal Sociologica, however, Skocpol acknowledges, “We in the universities … went overboard with trying to boost some groups over others.”  

That came in the midst of lowering standards — the average grade point average at Harvard is now, notoriously, around 3.8 or an A-minus.  

“We went too far in academia for a decade before (Donald) Trump, in giving the impression that students’ feelings matter more than what they learn. … We’re at the point at Harvard where everybody thinks they should get an A, and they don’t think they should do much to get it.”  

But how seriously should taxpayers, who foot the bill for much of higher ed’s mischief, take a professor like Skocpol when she says, “I believe in actual equality, applying the same standards to everyone, not using special quotas or excuses for particular groups”?  

Not very seriously, when in the same interview she says Trump administration officials who are cracking down on the academy’s follies “all resent some woman — particularly some Black woman — who told them what to do or who got what they think they deserved.”  

Harvard’s last president, Claudine Gay, was a black woman whose scholarship was infected with plagiarism. She’s still employed by Harvard, with a compensation package said to be in the neighbourhood of $900,000.  

The contrast between Gay’s treatment as a black woman and the white male students with exemplary records who have been discriminated against the way Hankins describes should make even Skocpol question her premises about why conservatives criticize higher education.  

Harvard and its peers have replaced Western history with global history and merit with identity politics.  

If scholars of Hankins’ calibre keep migrating to the freer and fairer setting of places like Florida, Harvard will at last find itself replaced, too.  

  
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review