A longtime history professor says post-2020 policy shifts at Harvard led to the informal exclusion of white male applicants, lowered academic standards, and a campus culture he described as increasingly ideological.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A Harvard University history professor who taught at the institution for four decades has issued a sharp public rebuke of the Ivy League school, alleging that changes to admissions and hiring practices amount to systematic discrimination against white male scholars and reflect a broader erosion of academic standards.
Professor James Hankins detailed his claims in an essay titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” published in Compact Magazine, writing that his decision to retire was made in 2021 following the COVID-19 lockdowns and the unrest after the death of George Floyd, events he said coincided with dramatic changes to Harvard’s graduate admissions process.
Hankins wrote that during the fall 2020 admissions cycle he reviewed an applicant he described as an exceptional fit for the program, adding that in prior years the candidate would have ranked at the top. “In 2021, however,” Hankins wrote, “I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that ‘that’—meaning admitting a white male—was ‘not happening this year.’”
He recounted a second case involving a white male undergraduate whom he described as “literally the best” student at Harvard, noting that the student won the prize awarded to the graduating senior with the highest overall academic record. According to Hankins, that student was also rejected from Harvard’s graduate program “because he too was a white male.”
“I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected,” Hankins wrote. “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,” he added, “had begun life as a female.”
Hankins’ essay and remarks circulated widely on social media, including in a post on X highlighting his allegations and retirement from the university shared here.
Hankins delivered his final lecture at Harvard two weeks ago, concluding a four-year retirement contract he signed in 2021 that has since expired.
In his essay, he also sharply criticized Harvard’s COVID-era policies, calling the restrictions “tyrannous invasions of private life.” He cited requirements that professors lecture while masked and conduct seminars over Zoom as emblematic of what he viewed as excessive institutional control.
Beyond admissions, Hankins accused Harvard of weakening academic standards over several decades, focusing on the abandonment of the department’s former “two-book standard,” which required faculty candidates to have published two books to demonstrate subject-matter expertise. He attributed the change to pressure from feminist activists beginning in the late 1990s.
“The two-book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty,” Hankins wrote. “Feminist activists, at Harvard as elsewhere, were demanding that half of all new appointments be women. That, they claimed, was what liberal standards of equality required.”
He noted that women had previously made up less than 10 percent of Ph.D. recipients in the history department, arguing that “equality required that standards be lowered.”
“Feminists denied vociferously that this was happening,” Hankins continued. “The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship.”
Hankins wrote that the result was a steady increase in the promotion of junior faculty, likening the internal dynamics to “Congress voting to restrain its own spending,” and suggesting the system lacked effective self-correction.
Harvard University has not publicly responded to Hankins’ claims.
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