Harvard history prof ditches Ivy League for Florida's Hamilton in attempt to save Western Civilization

Courses in Western Civilization have been in decline for decades in colleges, universities, and top high schools. Purveyors of that discipline took notice, and here and there tried to do something about it, but they were essentially useless to staunch the flow of the progressive retconning of western history.

As seminars in what was considered Third World history began to take over course catalogues, Harvard professor James Hankins writes that he started changing his offerings as well. He branched out from what he knew, European history over its many centuries, and started teaching areas where he did not feel himself to be a scholar. 

In Compact Magazine, he writes "I responded a bit myself to the prevailing winds. In the early 2000s I had been teaching an undergraduate seminar about ancient moral philosophy called 'Care of the Soul.' I turned it into a course on comparative traditions of moral self-cultivation. I included texts from Confucian, Buddhist, and Islamic traditions. Later I began to teach courses on comparative meritocracy, contrasting Western and Chinese traditions."

"My venture into comparative history awakened pangs of methodological conscience. I had been trained as an historian in the anal-retentive German philological tradition, among whose tenets was a prohibition against teaching from translations. Any professor whose knowledge of primary texts was based on translations rather than the original languages was to be considered as an incompetent fraud."

All around him, professors who were basically "incompetent frauds" peddled their ideological perspectives under the guise of scholarship. He writes that "International history replaced the diplomatic history of the United States. Instead of the Monroe Doctrine and Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Harvard undergrads could study the history of the Third World or the development of global markets."

Hankins said that he ended up teaching in China and realized that the academic institutions in that empire had no problem teaching not only Chinese history but Chinese supremacy. Just as western institutions were "de-centering" the west, Chinese institutions were saying the west was not as good as China, that western culture was inferior, and in response, western academics gobbled it up—they believed in their own inferiority too and passed it down to their students.

Is it any wonder that American students think so little of our nation? Our achievements? Our founding? Our culture? It is not, it was done by design, and Hankins watched it happen from the inside at Harvard University, a storied institution that launched so many American presidents. Harvard is a mess. It hosted Gaza camps, fostered anti-semitism, has a bias against white students, and has been under investigation by the Trump administration for civil rights violations.

"It is now more than half a century since 'Western civ' courses have been regularly required of high school and college students," Hankins writes. "Few students or teachers have retained a sense that they are inheritors of a great legacy handed down via the classical and Christian traditions.

"Few Westerners today understand where our civilizational commitments to free debate and rational argument, self-government, citizenship, constitutionalism, the rule of law, the idea of human dignity, and our love of personal freedoms come from, and why people in our past studied and worked and fought to preserve those things. Thanks to the pall of negativity that has settled on all things Western, fewer and fewer in the younger generation are able to appreciate Western arts and architecture, music, literature, and philosophy."

These universities were once the stewards of our culture, passing down our history, our literature, arts, music, to the next generations, encouraging them to add to it, revel in it, be part of it. Now these schools teach our young countrymen and countless numbers of foreign students to burn it all down and professors like Hankins must show themselves the door. Hankins is moving on to the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

Perhaps there is an irony in that the oldest university in the United States, Harvard University, founded just six years after the city of Boston was incorporated and 140 years before the birth of our nation, must cede its academic supremacy to a school created in 2022. The old schools are no longer providing the history and exceptionalism necessary to lead America, so it's up to the new generation to do it.