Harvard Scholar Blasts Ivy Alma Mater for ‘Woke’ Crusade Against White Men in Explosive Farewell Manifesto

By: Abe Wertenheim

For decades, Harvard University has prided itself on being the apex of American higher education, a temple of rigor whose faculty and alumni have shaped the nation’s intellectual life. But in a blistering farewell essay that has ignited debate across the country, a professor who devoted 40 years of his career to the institution says that Harvard has become unrecognizable — a place where merit has been eclipsed by ideology, and where entire categories of applicants are quietly sidelined.

As reported on Wednesday in The New York Post, history professor James Hankins used his retirement announcement not as a sentimental goodbye, but as a searing indictment of the culture that he says hollowed out one of the world’s most prestigious universities.

The essay, published in Compact Magazine under the title “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” recounts Hankins’ gradual disillusionment with the school he once loved. According to the information provided in The New York Post report, Hankins did not decide to leave on a whim. His exit, he wrote, was the culmination of years of frustration that reached a breaking point in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020.

Those two years, Hankins said, transformed the university’s internal culture — particularly in graduate admissions — in ways that he found ethically indefensible.

In one striking example highlighted in The New York Post report, Hankins recalled reviewing applications in the fall of 2020 and encountering what he described as an “outstanding prospect,” a student who would, in any previous year, have been at the top of the admissions list.

But in 2021, he wrote, a member of the admissions committee told him informally that admitting a white male applicant was simply “not happening this year.”

That episode, Hankins insists, was not an isolated case. As reported by The New York Post, he described another student — one he called “literally the best” undergraduate he had ever taught at Harvard — who had just won the university’s top academic prize, yet was rejected from every graduate program to which he applied.

The professor began making calls to colleagues at other elite institutions, trying to understand how such an extraordinary student could be turned away everywhere. What he heard, he wrote, was chillingly consistent.

Graduate admissions committees across the country, he said, were following the same unspoken protocol: certain demographics were effectively being frozen out, regardless of academic merit.

“The one exception I found,” Hankins wrote, in language cited by The New York Post, “had begun life as a female.”

The implication was unmistakable: the admissions process, once grounded in scholarly excellence, had become governed by ideological quotas that were never openly debated, let alone transparently codified.

Hankins’ disillusionment was not limited to admissions. He was equally scathing about Harvard’s pandemic-era policies, which he described as “tyrannous invasions of private life.”

According to The New York Post report, he was forced to lecture while masked and to conduct seminars on Zoom — practices he said were fundamentally incompatible with his conception of liberal education.

“Ideas are not exchanged in a vacuum,” he argued. “They are forged in the shared physical presence of minds in dialogue.” For a scholar steeped in the traditions of classical education, the virtualization of the university was not merely inconvenient; it was existentially corrosive.

Perhaps the most controversial portion of Hankins’ essay involves what he calls the erosion of academic rigor itself. As The New York Post report detailed, he lamented the abandonment of the “two-book standard” — a long-standing benchmark requiring junior faculty to publish two substantial books to demonstrate mastery of their field.

That standard, Hankins said, began to disappear in the late 1990s under pressure to rapidly diversify faculty ranks.

At the time, women represented fewer than 10% of PhDs in history, he wrote. Yet, activists demanded that half of all new hires be women — a mathematical impossibility without altering the criteria by which excellence had historically been measured.

Hankins insisted that the standard was lowered, not out of pedagogical necessity, but in response to ideological demands. Those who resisted, he said, were branded as reactionaries or worse.

“Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty,” he wrote, in lines circulated by The New York Post, comparing the dynamic to “Congress voting to restrain its own spending.”

Over time, Hankins argued, these shifts created an institution increasingly dominated by one political sensibility. The new cohort of faculty, he said, leaned sharply left, ushering in what he described as “countervailing winds” that reshaped curricula, hiring priorities, and intellectual culture.

Western history courses dwindled. Global history rose to prominence. Foreign students arrived in ever greater numbers. None of these changes were inherently problematic, Hankins acknowledged — but the cumulative effect, he argued, was the erosion of the university’s core identity.

According to the information contained in The New York Post report, he believes that this transformation marks the end of what he calls the “Ivy-plus” era — the model of elite education that once set the standard for the world.

“For now,” he wrote in his closing lines, “a better hope lies in building new institutions unencumbered by the corruption and self-hatred that infect the old.”

Harvard officials, for their part, have been cautious in their response. A spokesperson told Fox News that graduate admissions are faculty-led and handled at the department level, implicitly distancing the administration from the accusations.

Yet critics argue that this explanation only reinforces Hankins’ claims: if admissions decisions are decentralized, systemic patterns of exclusion may persist without meaningful oversight or accountability.

What makes Hankins’ essay resonate far beyond Cambridge is that it arrives amid a national reckoning over the future of American higher education. Enrollment declines, donor revolts, alumni lawsuits, and growing skepticism about the ideological homogeneity of elite universities have already shaken the sector.

By publishing his critique, Hankins has put a human face on that crisis — not as a disgruntled outsider, but as a lifelong insider who says he no longer recognizes the institution he served.

The New York Post report framed his departure as emblematic of a broader revolt among senior scholars who feel alienated by the culture now dominating elite campuses.

Hankins is not leaving academia. He has accepted a position as a visiting professor at the University of Florida — a school that has positioned itself as a counterweight to the Ivy League, emphasizing viewpoint diversity, traditional curricula and resistance to ideological litmus tests.

For Hankins, the move is not a retreat, but a recalibration.

As The New York Post has reported, he sees the future not in reforming institutions he believes are too far gone, but in helping to build alternatives — universities that prize merit, intellectual pluralism and the classical ideals he fears are slipping into oblivion.

Whether one agrees with Hankins or not, his essay forces an uncomfortable reckoning. If even the most accomplished students can find doors closed because of who they are rather than what they’ve achieved, then the moral authority of elite education itself is in jeopardy.

For a university that once defined the meaning of excellence, that may be the most devastating verdict of all.

One thing is clear: the debate he has ignited is not going away. It is a referendum on what higher education is for — and who it is willing to leave behind in the name of progress.