Harvard is the oldest university in America. Founded in 1636 in Cambridge as New College, it was renamed Harvard in 1639 after John Harvard, the Puritan minister who left his library and half of his estate to the school.
In its nearly 400-year history, Harvard has boasted some of pretty prestigious names including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama. In fact, Harvard has more U.S. presidents than any other university.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Matt Damon, Mark Zuckerberg, and Norman Mailer also graduated from Harvard.
The cultural, social, and political influence of the college cannot be understated. But Harvard has taking its once-stellar reputation and burned it to the ground in the name of woke.
Now one professor is blasting his former school in an essay.
Harvard professor torches Ivy League school over woke anti-white, anti-male culture in blistering essay https://t.co/8WQfZ3B84C pic.twitter.com/k7cuub6CiZ
— New York Post (@nypost) December 31, 2025
According to The New York Post, Professor James Hankins left Harvard after four decades at the Ivy League school, saying his decision to retire "was not a sudden one." In fact, Hankins made up his mind almost five years ago, after "two volatile years on campus" following COVID and the George Floyd riots.
In Hankins' essay, "Why I'm Leaving Harvard," he wrote:
"My decision to retire was not a sudden one. I am coming to the end of a four-year retirement contract that I signed in the fall of 2021. That year I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime. This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country’s uncritical acceptance of The Science and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education."
Recommended
He also spoke of the systemic racism at Harvard.
“In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool,” he wrote. "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 noted that another student who won a prize as a graduating senior for the best overall academic record was denied from the school's graduate programs.
"He too was a white male," Hankins noted. "I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected. Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours,” he continued.
Hankins' departure is part of a bigger problem with Harvard's woke, anti-white, and anti-Western civilization ideology. It turns out that Harvard now has no tenured professors teaching Western Civilization in its history department.
DEI: Harvard has erased Western Civilization from its history department. The West is out. Ideology is in. America’s oldest elite university no longer teaches its own civilization.
— @amuse (@amuse) December 31, 2025
Harvard’s history department no longer employs any tenured faculty focused on Western… pic.twitter.com/u7tM9FjiaF
And Harvard Magazine, even two decades ago, was calling for the abolition of the white race.
Harvard University called for the abolishment of the White race in their magazine pic.twitter.com/k5n6a9wg5G
— Taya (@travelingflying) January 1, 2026
"Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race," the article read. "That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to the reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed — not 'deconstructed' but destroyed."
Harvard used to be the gold standard for American higher education. Some of the best, most creative minds graduated from the school — men who often shaped America and Western Civilization. Now, the Harvard sneers at both of those things, and the Left has dismantled that institution from the inside out. This is institutional decay playing out for all of us to watch in real time.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join Townhall VIP and use promo code MERRY74 to get 74% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member