By Selwyn Duke

It’s sadly ironic that a university founded in 1636 to train clergy has embraced the devilish religion of racist dogma. But this is the case, warns 40-year Harvard history professor James Hankins. In fact, it’s so bad that he has left the school.

What’s at issue is damning, Hankins warns. Harvard University not only rejects teaching Western civilization’s virtues, but also won’t hire white males — no matter their qualifications. It has instead embraced a “hate whitey” philosophy that demeans the West and the European-descent peoples who birthed it.

This is merely the latest, too, in the war on white men. Just last month, for example, an aspiring Hollywood writer documented entertainment’s, media’s, and academia’s refusal to hire white males. Also revealed in December was that a university writing center had claimed that emphasizing proper English is “linguistic white supremacy.”

Reporting on the current story, The Western Journal tells us:

Hankins wrote in a Compact Magazine essay titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard” that his decision was largely influenced by the school’s abandonment of merit in favor of diversity quotas, which he said entirely changed “the way we conducted our affairs,” leaving extraordinary candidates behind if they did not have Harvard’s desired skin color or [sex].

In 2020, Hankins said, “the university had collectively taken a knee during the Summer of Floyd.”

No More Mensches in Harvard’s Trenches

As for specificity on the anti-white-male discrimination, Hankins wrote Sunday at Compact:

In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. 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.” 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.

(Translation: She was not an “exception.”)

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at Harvard, either. Just consider Claudine Gay, the first black woman appointed to Harvard’s presidency. It emerged in late 2023 that she’d scammed her way into that position, as she’d engaged in gross plagiarism. And why didn’t the vaunted Harvard vet her properly before hiring? Because it was more concerned with elevating non-whites than with elevating the school.

The Endangered and Maligned Western Man

Speaking of DEI-driven elevation brings us to Harvard’s position on Western civilization. As RealClearPolitics writes, relating Hankins’ revelations about this agenda:

“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-centering the West,’ where Western countries are literally put in their place as an ugly growth on the back side of Eurasia.”

Really, though, it’s synonymous with de-centering Truth. Know that “Central Asian peoples” would include the brutal Mongol Empire. Unlike the Romans — who though imperfect built infrastructure and spread civilization — destruction was the Mongols’ specialty. Harvard’s revisionist history is a total inversion of reality.

Why This Really Matters

As to the importance of teaching “the young what civilization is,” note here that history could be conceptualized as a record of the series of man’s social experiments. And it’s just as with actual experiments: Scientists record them so they don’t repeat past errors. They must be able to say, “We tried that before, and it didn’t work.” Or, “Yes, that yielded fruit; let’s repeat it and build upon it.”

If people don’t know what “worked” in history, they can’t replicate it and perpetuate civilizational glory. And tell people bad is good and that what degraded actually uplifted, and they’ll happily recreate failure — and destroy themselves.

As I illustrated in “A World Without the West,” in such a place darkness would reign. This is exactly what Harvard, an institution ironically born of Western culture, is trying to deliver, too.

All this again, though, raises a question: Why are we still taking unserious institutions such as Harvard seriously? We talk much about the political swamp, but the academic one needs draining perhaps more than any other.

This article was originally published at The New American.