A Move Away From “Western History?” 

In December 2025, Professor James Hankins announced his departure from the History department, ending his nearly four-decade tenure at Harvard. He explained his decision to leave Harvard in his viral opinion piece published in the Dec. 29 issue of “Compact,” titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” in which he gave a detailed account of the pedagogical transformation that had occurred in the History department over the course of 40 years. Hankins explained that the study of Western civilizations within Harvard’s History department is being replaced by “global history.” 

When Hankins began teaching in Harvard’s History department in 1985, the conservative and progressive parties were largely aligned about the ideal content of a history education—post-secondary history curricula were less shaped by political disagreement. But over time, this cohesion diverged. Now, while Hankins, alongside some Harvard University peers, believes that studying the West is necessary to “preserve it,” other History professors maintain that incorporating a greater breadth of civilizational study into such a field nuances the University’s characteristic liberal arts education.

After being promoted to Director of Undergraduate Studies for the department in 1992, Hankins moved to add a course on Western civilizations as a concentration requirement. The course was named History 10a and focused on Greece, Rome, and Early Modern Europe. Upon completing History 10a, students were then required to take History 10b. This second course pivoted to a more transnational, globally inclusive approach to historical studies. Hankins detailed that the inclusion of 10b was “chiefly a political move to get the department to approve the proposal.”

Hankins viewed the decision to make 10b an elective for concentrators as unsuccessful overall. One contributing factor was a surge in faculty hiring. “The new hires were left-leaning, though a few could be counted as disciplinary conservatives. The need to teach the history of our own civilization was not among their priorities,” he said in his December article.

In 2003, after History 10a was changed from a mandatory course to an optional one for History concentrators, student enrollment in the class significantly decreased. “As an elective, the course enrollment fell drastically and became difficult to staff,” Hankins continued.  

Courses Hankins categorizes as “transnational history” expanded into the 2000s. This shift coincided with a trend of left-leaning faculty hires. “In the hands of hyper-progressive (or ‘woke’) practitioners, Western global history is often, indeed, actively anti-Western,” Hankins wrote.

Other department faculty characterize the situation differently. “The department has indeed been a world-leading center for world, transnational, or global history since the days of Bernard Bailyn and Akira Iriye from the 1980s onward,” current History department head Professor Dan Smail wrote in a statement to the “Independent.” However, increased offerings in global history have not replaced Western history education within the department. “More than half the faculty in the History department primarily identify with European and American fields,” Smail continued.

“The teaching of subjects in Western history has changed,” Smail said. “Many faculty, for example, are now very alert to the fact that trends in the West cannot easily be thought of or explained independently of global factors.”

The growing share of non-Western studies has developed due to changing understandings of the world among scholars and, by extension, the shifting interests of the student body. “I think there’s value in learning things from different cultures or time periods … because we live within a very specific societal construct in which we’re under the same economic and political system of most contemporary western thinkers,” Jacob Kiflu ’29 said.

“By looking at thought from around the world, we can be introduced to radically different perspectives of how to understand the human condition while still being able to resonate with the greater universality of being human.”

“I did not blame the strange death of Western history on the recent politicization of the university that goes under the adjective ‘woke.’ Wokery was at most an accelerant, not what started the fire,” Hankins explained on his Substack. “The globalizers have made a more convincing case to [department deans] than we traditionalists.”

These shifts are not unique to Harvard. “Colleagues at other ‘Ivy+’ universities have reported the same phenomenon,” Hankins claimed.

To scholars like Hankins, this pattern is dangerous. Learning about the West and the traditions derived from Greco-Roman thought must be studied to uphold the foundational pillars of our civilization. “Even now there are some liberal academics who accept what used to be a matter of common sense: that the young, whatever their ethnic roots, should learn about the civilization that made them, the Western traditions that created the beliefs in order to understand what gave rise to the beliefs and institutions among which, sightless, they now live,” he added.

Hankins’ departure coincides with Harvard’s longstanding feud with the Trump administration. Universities like Harvard have become the targets of politicized attacks from conservatives like Trump, who are disillusioned with the nation’s educated elite. Last year, President Donald Trump declared in a Truth Social post that Harvard hires “almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots.”

Shortly after its publication, “Fox News” covered Hankins’ piece, propelling its virality. Without quoting Hankins directly, the right-leaning media giant seized on the opportunity to critique Harvard’s academic standards. “The History department, harangued by activists, has lowered academic standards and all but abandoned the Western canon and Western history alike,” “Fox News” wrote. Elon Musk retweeted a screenshot of Hankins’s piece to elucidate what he believes to be discrimination against white males in Ph.D. admissions.

Like Trump, Professor Hankins—who will continue his pedagogical career teaching at the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida—was disillusioned with the overwhelming majority of progressive faculty at Harvard. His departure means that Harvard lost one of the few remaining voices in a small political minority.

It is not as though all professors who teach Western history are disillusioned with the departmental changes. Professor Alison Frank Johnson’s pedagogy focuses on the history of German-speaking Europe. “Adding more global history perspectives to our curriculum didn’t and doesn’t require that we take anything away,” Frank Johnson wrote in a statement to the “Independent.”

Despite her Western focus, Professor Frank Johnson believes in the importance of the study of history from all parts of the globe. 

“I also appreciate colleagues who turn my attention and our students’ attention to the significance of human thought, belief systems, political movements, migration, scientific discoveries, art, cultural practices, social organizations, and every other form of activity in all of the parts of the world where people live and travel,” Professor Johnson said. “Why should these be opposed to one another?”

Erik Stauffer ’29 (estauffer@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the “Independent.”