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In his essay Why I’m Leaving Harvard, published by Compact Magazine, Hankins explained how one admissions decision finally forced him to walk away.
“In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program,” Hankins wrote.
In any previous year, that student would have been a top choice.
But this was no longer a normal year.
“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,’” Hankins revealed.
That sentence was not accidental. It was policy.
Merit No Longer Mattered
Hankins says the discrimination went far beyond one applicant.
He described tutoring a white male undergraduate who was not just strong academically, but arguably unmatched.
The student was “literally the best student at Harvard—he won the prize for the graduating senior with the best overall academic record.”
Despite his credentials, the student was rejected by every graduate program he applied to.
Hankins tried to understand why.
“I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected,” he wrote. “Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours.”
The only exception was a candidate “who had begun life as a female.”
That reality made clear what had replaced merit based admissions across elite academia.
How Standards Quietly Fell
According to Hankins, the decline began decades earlier.
Before the 1990s, Harvard followed what was known as the two book standard for senior faculty. Professors were expected to publish two major scholarly works before being promoted.
“The two-book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty,” Hankins wrote.
At the time, women made up less than ten percent of history PhDs. Instead of waiting for the pipeline to grow, standards were lowered.
“Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty,” Hankins explained.
The long term result was devastating.
Harvard has not hired a single tenured historian in a Western field in over ten years. Eight senior scholars in those fields left or retired. None were replaced.
Western Civilization Becomes The Villain
As standards declined, the curriculum changed with them.
Traditional Western civilization courses were replaced with ideological “global history” classes.
“‘Transnational history’ meant that Europeanists would no longer teach the internal history of European nations—no more courses on the German Reformation, Elizabethan England, or the French Revolution,” Hankins explained.
The new goal was “de-centering the West.”
Ironically, Hankins noted that Chinese history courses still promoted national pride. But Western history was treated differently.
“Western global history, by contrast, displays no loyalty to Western societies or traditions; quite the contrary,” Hankins wrote. “In the hands of hyper-progressive (or ‘woke’) practitioners, Western global history is often, indeed, actively anti-Western.”
The university that educated eight U.S. Presidents now teaches students that Western societies are inherently illiberal.
Trump Forces A Reckoning
That transformation finally drew the attention of the federal government.
President Donald Trump launched an investigation into Harvard’s nine billion dollars in federal funding after the school refused to dismantle its DEI programs.
In April 2025, the administration froze more than 2.2 billion dollars in grants and contracts after Harvard president Alan Garber rejected federal demands.
Harvard responded by quietly renaming its diversity office.
But the culture did not change.
The same system that told Hankins “that’s not happening this year” remains in place.
Walking Away From A Broken Institution
Hankins has since accepted a position at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education, an institution committed to teaching Western civilization rather than apologizing for it.
“For those like myself, however, who have lived through the decline of higher education in ‘elite’ universities, that would be a triumph of hope over experience,” Hankins wrote when asked about reforming Harvard.
That single phrase from an admissions committee was not a mistake.
It was an admission.
And thanks to professors willing to speak out, Americans are finally learning what is really happening inside Harvard’s gates.
