Harvard In The Grip Of Barbarians

Veritas corrupted: the politicization of scholarship at Harvard College.

Lars Møller | August 20, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: View of Harvard College (William Burgis, 1743)

The departure of Professor James Hankins from Harvard University after four decades of teaching Renaissance history rises above a personal career transition. In fact, it reflects the institutional surrender of one of America’s premier centers of learning to forces that treat the Western tradition as an embarrassment rather than an inheritance.

In late 2025, Hankins published “Why I’m Leaving Harvard” in Compact, an essay that chronicled the systematic displacement of Western civilization and classical history by global and transnational approaches. He framed his exit as a protest against a pedagogical regime that has allowed the core narrative of Europe’s intellectual and political achievement to wither. The essay’s credibility derived from its author’s long tenure and from the clarity with which it named the resulting cultural cost: a younger generation left morally and intellectually disoriented, cut off from the historical sources of its own liberty and institutional forms.

Hankins observed that Harvard’s history department had gradually abandoned dedicated instruction in the Western tradition. Ancient, medieval, and early modern European history, once central to the curriculum, were subordinated to broad global surveys that dilute chronological depth and civilizational focus. Faculty hiring priorities shifted accordingly. New colleagues, Hankins noted, rarely regarded the transmission of the West’s own past as a priority. The consequence was a curriculum that treated the civilization which produced constitutional government, scientific method, and the rule of law as one provincial story among many, preferably refracted through the lens of grievance rather than achievement.

Students who once encountered Thucydides, Cicero, Augustine, or the English constitutional tradition in systematic sequence now confront a fragmented landscape of transnational themes and identity frameworks. As if a revolution had taken place, they are indoctrinated into the binary victim-oppressor model. The loss is not merely curricular. It severs the continuity that allowed successive generations to understand themselves as heirs to a specific historical project rather than as free-floating critics of it. Graver still, it........

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