#86 Why a Harvard Professor Walked Away · And What the University Can’t Say Out Loud

After forty years at Harvard, historian James Hankins quietly walked away.

Not in protest. Not in anger. But with a diagnosis.

In this episode of Think First, we examine Hankins’ final essay and a recent interview to understand what changed inside elite universities — not ideologically, but institutionally. From the disappearance of Western civilization requirements to shifting hiring incentives and the loss of a shared cultural foundation, this isn’t a story about politics. It’s about drift.

We explore how poetic truth replaces standards, how reassurance substitutes for evidence, and why institutions can look unchanged while becoming something entirely different.

If this episode feels less like an argument and more like a diagnosis, that’s intentional.

Read my essay at detjen.substack.com

Chapters

• 0:00 The Quiet Exit At Harvard
• 2:20 From Expansion To Substitution
• 5:00 Incentives And The Vanishing Core
• 8:45 COVID Habits And Admissions Drift
• 12:20 Hiring Freezes And Standards Redefined
• 15:30 Yale’s Signal And China’s Counter
• 18:55 Hankins On Tradition And Loss

Transcript

Jim Detjen: 0:00

Two of my three children were taught by the same professor at Harvard, not a visiting lecturer, not a postdoc, a tenured historian with four decades inside the institution. They weren't taught what to think, they were taught how civilizations think and how they forget. Two weeks after giving his final lecture, that professor published a quiet essay explaining why he was leaving Harvard after forty years. No protest, no viral thread, no scorched earth, just a calm account of what he watched change and what quietly disappeared. And if you read it carefully, something unsettling emerges. He isn't describing a hostile takeover. He's describing drift. A university that didn't wake up one morning and decide to abandon its civilizational inheritance, but slowly reorganized itself until teaching that inheritance felt inappropriate, unfashionable, problematic, optional. This episode isn't about Harvard being evil. If anything, it's about how good intentions age badly inside large institutions. It isn't about left versus right, and it isn't about nostalgia. It's about what happens when an institution forgets what it exists to pass on, while insisting nothing essential has changed. This is Think First, where we don't follow the script. We question it. Because in a world full of poetic truths and professional gaslighting, someone's gotta say the quiet part out loud. James Hankins spent 40 years teaching history at Harvard. That matters. Not because Harvard is perfect, but because it functions as a signal institution. When Harvard shifts, others follow. Quietly, patiently. Hankins' argument is often flattened into ideology. That misses the point. He's not arguing that global history is illegitimate. He's not dismissing non-Western civilizations. He's not claiming conspiracy. What he is documenting is substitution. Western history wasn't expanded. It was replaced, not through open debate, not through faculty votes, but through incentives. Hiring priorities changed, tenure lines disappeared, required courses quietly became electives, standards loosened selectively, all while the institution told itself a reassuring story. We're becoming more inclusive, we're becoming more global, we're becoming more humane. Hankins poses a harder question. What happens when an institution teaches everything except the civilization that built it? And what happens to students when they inherit institutions without inheriting the reasons those institutions exist? The official narrative is familiar. Universities globalized, they diversified, they updated outdated frameworks. Western civilization courses were framed as narrow, provincial, exclusionary. Global history, by contrast, was expansive, comparative, morally sophisticated. No one announced that Western history was being banned. It simply stopped being required, then it stopped being staffed, then it stopped being hired. Hankins documents a striking pattern. At Harvard, historians in Western fields, ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern, stopped receiving tenure lines. Ancient history was outsourced to classics. Diplomatic history gave way to systems and networks. Political history thinned. Military history all but vanished, not replaced with better versions, replaced with different priorities. Students could study the effects of empire without studying the constitutional ideas that constrain power. They could study identity without studying the civilizational inheritance that produced citizenship. They could study critique without studying construction. And the university told itself this was progress. Here's the irony. The institution that taught students to question everything, preferably everyone else first, never questioned whether removing its own civilizational core might have consequences. Hankins's essay doesn't rely on abstractions, it relies on moments, small enough to dismiss individually, large enough to matter collectively. During the COVID years, Harvard embraced emergency governance, mask mandates, Zoom seminars, compliance framed as virtue. Hankins doesn't deny the pandemic. He notes the habit it trained, uncritical submission to authority when backed by institutional power. Then came admissions. In 2020 and 2021, Hankins encountered graduate applicants who, in prior years, would have risen immediately to the top, with outstanding credentials, perfect program fit. He was told, informally, that admitting one such candidate wasn't happening this year. The reason wasn't academic weakness, it was demographic. Race and sex, quietly, had become disfavored variables in elite admissions and hiring. No memo, no policy, just an unspoken protocol. That same year, the best undergraduate student at Harvard, the top academic performer of his class, was rejected from every graduate program he applied to. Hankins checked with colleagues across institutions. The pattern repeated. There were exceptions, but only when a candidate's demographic classification changed. This is not conjecture. These are observed outcomes. He then widens the lens. Western historians retired, passed away, left. They were not replaced. For more than a decade, Harvard hired no tenured historians in Western fields. Meanwhile, the University of Florida's Hamilton School, founded only four years earlier, hired 48 scholars, 28 in Western history, 12 in American history, from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge. Many of those scholars came from a demographic now quietly disfavored in elite hiring, not because of merit, but because merit had become inconvenient. He also points to academic standards. Long-standing criteria, like the two-book publication standard for tenure, were shelved under pressure to meet new hiring goals. This wasn't framed as lowering standards, it was framed as redefining excellence. Then there's Yale. In the 1990s, Yale returned a$20 million gift rather than commit to teaching Western civilization. Returned it. Not because of money, but because of mission. And one more irony, Western global history courses, taught entirely in English, are viewed in China as cultural imperialism. China responded by teaching its own global history, centered on national identity, continuity, and civilizational pride. The West alone teaches global history with no loyalty to itself. Up to this point, we've talked about what changed. Now I want you to hear how James Hankins himself understands it. Not as a political fight, not as nostalgia, but as a breakdown in something much quieter. A shared cultural foundation that used to let educated people talk to each other across disagreement. Listen closely to what he says about tradition, innovation, and what happens when a civilization stops teaching itself.

SPEAKER_00: 7:58

Well, I think, yes, up until quite recently, there has been a very strong balance between tradition and innovation. You had scientists who were uh educated in the Western tradition, they valued uh reason, free speech, free religion, all those things because they were brought up in it. They were trained in Western Civ. Western Civ was simply a name for the way most people were educated for the last 500 years, which is in the Greco-Roman classics and in religion and in uh science. But at some point, the tradition started to be uh distrusted. The innovators were allowed to trample all over uh the past. They were not restrained anymore by religious convictions or by civilizational convictions that are deeply rooted in our civilization about, especially ones about government, I think, have been, you know, we're all talking about democracy, but nobody knows what democracy means. One of the reasons why we have uh so many cultural disagreements is because we don't have anything in common culturally, which we used to have. You know, I have the smartest students in the world, supposedly at Harvard, and I cannot communicate with a great number of them because their world begins in 2010. And some of them are well educated, and I can talk about Shakespeare and Milton in the Bible, uh, and I can talk about uh Homer, but others know nothing about these. So there's no common foundation that you can uh that that values the tradition. You don't hear an outcry uh when uh terrible architectural disasters are imposed on on center cities because people don't understand what beautiful architecture looks like.

SPEAKER_01: 9:48

And at some point, did you see that a kind of skepticism about tradition and a kind of fashionable uh tendency to attack it became dominant within universities like Harvard? Is that something you've witnessed over the decades that the kind of anti-traditionalists won over?

SPEAKER_00: 10:08

No, I think that that that's true, especially at Harvard. I've seen this go on. There's always been people who were strongly in favor of innovation in Harvard since the late 19th century. Uh, Harvard's always been one of the main champions of Darwinian evolution, for example, it's one of the first and most fierce defenders of Darwinian evolution, but they also had Christians here who were in the majority until the 1960s. They had people who valued our tradition, and we had faculties, humanities faculties, that had built their curricula around the traditions of the West. So people valued those things. Uh, but at certain point in the 19th century, in the first decade of the of the 21st century, as I think, when when people ceased to think that was important. You know, that we could do away with Western Civ requirements, we could start bringing in young adult authors and comic books into the curriculum of the English department, that you got this unwillingness to distinguish between what was genuinely good on some kind of universal plane, and things that were just uh phenomena of culture that professors could talk cleverly about. Right. That's one of the main uh things I noticed about modern elite quote-unquote culture is that there is no there are no qualitative distinctions.

SPEAKER_01: 11:35

So you've taken the decision now to leave Harvard. You are moving to this new institute in the University of Florida, which is dedicated to classical and Western canonical history and tradition. Are you giving up on Harvard? Do you feel like it's it's gone too far and is now unsavable? Is that why you're leaving?

SPEAKER_00: 11:58

No. I have no such conclusion. I I'm a Renaissance scholar. I believe in the possibility of Renaissance. Renaissance is absolutely central to the Western tradition. We didn't something we didn't get to, but the Western tradition is a history of Renaissances. So I don't give up on Harvard, but I just think I can do more good in Florida right now. I've been at Harvard for 40 years, and uh I have students that I'm very sorry to leave because most of the more conservative students take my courses, and I'm sorry about that, but I think I can do much more good in Florida. Florida is uh really serious about reviving Western tradition. You know, we haven't hired a senior professor in modern Western history in my department since 2007, and we've lost eight. But in Florida, we've hired 24 Western historians in three years. So uh the if you're going to revive Western civilization, as I hope to do, the study of Western civilization, I mean, which implies reviving Western civilization also, the chances of doing this in a place in in Florida where you have strong political support for this for this institute, and where you have many young uh scholars, the faculty at Hamilton School are all very young. I'm the oldest guy there.

Jim Detjen: 13:17

That clip is from a recent unheard podcast conversation with James Hankins. That wasn't a rant. That was a historian describing what happens when a culture loses its common reference points. When innovation is no longer restrained by inherited standards, not religious ones, not civilizational ones, not even aesthetic ones. This is the part most debates skip. It's not that people disagree more, it's that they no longer share enough in common to even know what they're disagreeing about. Or as Hankins put it more politely than most of us would, when everyone's educated, but no one's educated together. Let's steel man the mainstream view. Global history arose for good reasons. Multiculturalism sought to correct blind spots, inclusion aimed at fairness. But here's where the frame breaks. Civilizations are not self-replicating. They require memory. Curriculum isn't neutral. It is how a civilization remembers why its institutions exist. When origins are removed, institutions feel arbitrary. When institutions feel arbitrary, authority feels illegitimate. When authority feels illegitimate, power feels oppressive. Students then inherit systems they don't understand, and are trained to dismantle what they were never taught to build. Hankins is explicit about this. He writes that elite universities are now fundamentally compromised by ideological conformity, and that hope lies not in reforming them from within, but in building new institutions unencumbered by those constraints. That is his conclusion, not an interpretation. As my book Distorted lays out, confusion isn't a failure mode. It's what happens when incentives replace truth and poetic truth start standing in for reality editing. We're living in a moment where truth feels strangely negotiable. A headline can be technically wrong, yet emotionally persuasive. A narrative can fall apart under scrutiny and still survive in the group chat. And institutions keep saying, trust us, even when the facts have quietly drifted out of frame. Distorted is the book that asks the uncomfortable question behind all of this. How does a society lose its grip on what's real while believing it's becoming more informed? It's not a memoir, it's not a manifesto, it's a map of the psychological shortcuts, storytelling maneuvers, and cultural incentives that shape our perception long before we notice the shaping. Drawing from behavioral science, media history, political strategy, and hundreds of real-world examples, Distorted shows why even thoughtful people, especially thoughtful people, get pulled into narratives that feel true but aren't. If you sense there's a pattern beneath the chaos, you're right. And this book helps you see it. Distorted arrives February 10th on Barnes Noble, Amazon, Audible, and your favorite bookstore. It's your book for understanding the moment we're all living through and why questioning the script might be the most rational thing you can do. Alright, back to the show. Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere. Institutions insist nothing fundamental has changed, while outcomes diverge radically. Standards remain, except when they conflict with optics. Language becomes moralized. Critique replaces construction. Heritage becomes suspicion. This kind of drift doesn't announce itself. It shows up in small, repeatable signals, long before the consequences are obvious. Three cues to watch for. One, when excellence quietly becomes a liability. Two, when memory is downgraded to optional. Three, when reassurance replaces evidence. Drift doesn't begin in speeches or mission statements, it begins in decisions that feel administrative. Here are two early warning signs to watch. Hiring, who gets brought in and who quietly doesn't. And required curricula. What stops being mandatory before anyone notices? That's where drift shows first. James Hankins didn't rage quit Harvard, he walked away, because he recognized something most institutions don't until it's too late. You can't ask an institution to preserve something it no longer believes it's allowed to name. Here are a few think first questions to sit with. When you hear an institution say, nothing has changed, what would you check first? Hiring, standards, or what's quietly no longer required? When excellence starts needing an apology, what usually replaces it? And when something gets rebranded as more humane, ask yourself, humane to whom, and at what cost? And before we go, let's lighten this just a bit. If this episode made you feel smarter and slightly more tired than usual, congratulations. That's what thinking feels like. If you found yourself nodding along, then pausing, then wondering whether you could still explain where half your own assumptions came from, also normal. And if you're already thinking, wow, that was heavy for the first week of the year, fair, but history has a sense of humor too. Every generation thinks they discovered complexity, and every civilization eventually learns that ignoring the past doesn't make you modern, it just makes you surprised later. So, as we head into the new year, here's my quiet wish for you. May you question gently. May you spot drift early. May you keep your curiosity sharper than your certainty. And may you enter the year ahead a little harder to gaslight and a little harder to impress with comforting stories. Happy New Year! And remember, a civilization that forgets itself doesn't become global. It becomes hollow. You don't need all the answers, but you should question the ones you're handed. Until next time, stay skeptical, stay curious, and always think first.substack.com.