If you want to understand the crisis of elite universities in America, here is an exceptional testimony: the farewell to Harvard of one of the greatest scholars of Western classical culturea world-famous Italianist. It’s a public divorceannounced and motivated because Harvard has repudiated this cultural tradition: ours. It is only the latest episode of a story that has at least sixty years behind it…
James Hankins (born 1955 in Philadelphia) is one of the most important American historians, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance and the classical tradition. He has been a professor at Harvard University since 1985, and after more than four decades of teaching he has assumed emeritus status at that university. This great classicist, author of over twenty essays translated throughout the worldwhose production ranges from ancient Greece to the golden age of Italian humanistic culture, today he announces that he is leaving Harvard permanently. Not for seniority, not for retirement. Here’s why, in his words:
«Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard University, where I have been a history professor for forty years. Four decades of experience at one of the world’s leading universities have afforded me a privileged observation point to follow the progressive replacement of Western history with global history. This change is part of the reason why younger generations today find themselves in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation. I came to the end of a four-year contract I signed in the fall of 2021. In that year I decided that I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had been subjected to the rigid regime for almost two years regime Covid of the university. It was an emergency form of government that reflected all too faithfully the uncritical acceptance, by the entire country, in the name of the alleged “Science” supported by public power, of tyrannical invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were required to hold lectures with masks and hold seminars on Zoom. Neither practice was compatible with my idea of liberal education.”
The previous year the university had collectively knelt during the Summer of George Floyd (the mass protests led by Black Lives Matter after the killing of the African American in Minneapolis by a policeman, ndr). I thought it was an empty act of virtue, but I was wrong: it had serious consequences for the way we conducted our businesses. In the fall of 2020, while reviewing applications to doctoral programs, I came across a exceptional candidateperfectly suited to our course of study. In previous years he would have immediately jumped to the top of the rankings. In 2021, however, a member of the admissions committee told me informally that “that thing” (i.e. admitting a white male) “couldn’t happen this year”. In the same year, a university student I had tutored, of extraordinary intelligence, literally Harvard’s best student — winner of the award for the graduating student with the best overall academic curriculum — he was rejected from every doctoral program to which he applied. He was also a white male. I called several friends at various universities to find out why he had been rejected. Everywhere they told me the same story: doctoral admissions committees across the country were following the same unwritten protocol that was true here too. The only exception I found to this blanket exclusion of white males was a person who was born a woman. I believe that Harvard today is on a better course under the leadership of its current president, Alan Garber. The reaction to the university’s shocking indifference towards the anti-Semitic demonstrations following the atrocities of October 7, 2023, forced the Harvard Corporation — the body that chooses the president — to seek safe leadership. Nonetheless, I believe I can make much better use of my time and experience at my new institutional home—the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida—than at Harvard. The reason is simple: Hamilton School is committed to teaching the history of Western civilization. When progressive pedagogy replaced courses on Western civilization with global history, serious damage was done to the socialization of young Americans. When you don’t teach young people what civilization is, you find that people become uncivilized.”
The refusal to study and teach that horrible thing that is Western culture and civilization actually has a much older history than the Summer of Floyd, Black Lives Matter, the «woke culture». I recalled a background in my essay “Thank You, West” a year ago. Stanford University, one of California’s most elite universities, abolished its history course titled “Western Civilization.” already in 1963. Over sixty years ago. That is, watch the calendar: three years before Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in China, five years before the European Sixty-eight, in America a piece of academic culture was already ready to sink into self-loathing. And Stanford was not considered a radical university, in fact it was a moderate university compared to nearby Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movementthe first student protest of the 1960s. The destruction of our cultural heritage, the amputation of our roots, has an ancient history. What the classicist and Italianist Hankins evokes in a modest way – the replacement of “Western history” with “global history” – is in reality an ideological teaching that has a precise thesis: we must study the cultures of other ethnic groups to learn from them, and to correct ourselves for our original sins. It is one of the mistakes of the West that send leaders like Xi Jinping (whose daughter studied at Harvard), Putin, Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Salman into ecstasy. For them it is simply incomprehensible that a civilization denies itself, turns its back on its history, stop teaching it, or even put it in a state of permanent accusation.
Trump’s showdown against Harvard is just a micro-episode, a recent, marginal and perhaps irrelevant anecdote. The Trump-Harvard clash does not address the roots of the work of systematic destruction of American-Western self-esteem, which a part of the academy has been pursuing since the beginning of the 1960s. Trump and MAGA America do not have the means, either political, economic or intellectual, to reverse that trend in a substantial and lasting way. The reaction must occur endogenously, that is, from within the education system. An interesting sign is precisely that a great Renaissance scholar like Hankins does not throw in the towel, but rather changes university. America is pluralistic, even in academic institutions. Internal competition can help, especially since the super-elite universities of theIvy League they have added other self-destructive impulses to their ancient anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism: the predatory escalation of tuition, for example, sows doubts on the validity of the “investment in Harvard” (or Yale, Princeton, Columbia), in light of the probabilities of amortizing it and repaying it on the current labor market.
December 30, 2025, 09:34 – edit December 30, 2025 | 12.32pm
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