This Harvard History Professor's Resignation Shows Exactly How Far History Education Has Fallen

The last remaining Western History professor at Harvard is out.

"We have not hired with tenure a historian in a Western field—ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern—in a decade," says Professor James Hankins, detailing his resignation from Harvard in an article for Compact Magazine.

Normally, when a professor resigns, he goes quietly. Not Hankins. In addition to a searing series of articles, Hankins recently published, along with his co-author, a glorious textbook on Western history entitled The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom, which chronicles the history of the Western world from the point of view that it is okay—even necessary—to defend Western civilization as a product of many great ideas and values.

In an exclusive interview with me, Prof. Hankins comments that his "textbook is not written in a morally neutral style" and that "we're not shying away from moral judgments."

Thank goodness. History was always best taught as a kind of "practical wisdom," says Hankins. There was always a moral component of teaching history, by using the wisdom of the past to inform decisions in the future. The fact that modern universities have eliminated this component, preferring to treat all cultures as "equal," is a watering down of it.

"We don't want to treat history as some kind of value-free zone. That's the way it's often taught in academic university departments these days, that we don't want to make any kind of moral judgments," he tells me.

Hankins is shedding light on one of the true causes of the decline of the humanities: a forced equalizing of cultures in history that is the product of generations not only of anti-Western bent, but cowardice and a lack of confidence of history professors to lead and participate in the intellectual defense of their own studies.

"When you don't teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized," Hankins notes.

For example, consider the way that modern universities teach about Latin America. Ignoring completely the seizures of property, flouting of free and fair elections, and universal human rights abuses of the Maduro regime, American universities train students to give the government the same moral leeway as any other "oppressed" country. Forget the fact that living standards are much higher in free, classically liberal Latin American democracies like Chile and Argentina—universities seek to group them as all under the repressive hand of Western imperialism and colonialism.

Meanwhile, university students march on the streets of American cities like Charlotte, North Carolina as if the horrible, dictatorial Maduro regime is just another "minoritized," "oppressed" country that should be treated as morally equal, even superior due to their condition, to the United States.

Of course one issue—the issue of race—is practically the only moral judgment modern universities are willing to make these days, and even that has been bungled by the woke parasitical movement.

That's because, ironically, the woke parasitical movement is not informed by history. It is informed by ahistorical moral judgment—a kind of kneejerk assumption that just because a race or group is more disproportionately in positions of wealth, power and influence, that they must have arrived there because of subjugation.

To this, historical context is needed. If whites acquired power and influence by subjugating blacks, as leftists claim, why is it that the children of non-white immigrants rise in wealth and every other indicator of social success?

I'm talking, of course, about Asian Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, and the countless other minorities, who have—within a couple generations and in eras with less discrimination against African Americans—climbed up ladders in America to the point where some of these groups are today simply considered "white."

This speaks to the necessity of seriously studied history, the kind that challenges preconceived assumptions. For example, in Nikole Hannah-Jones' faux-historical "1619 Project," the Civil War is never mentioned. This historical fact that the United States went to war to eradicate slavery (and to protect) illuminates the centrality of our moral propositions. If you want to judge the United States, fine, but judge it based on historical evidence and context, not based on a premeditated hypothesis.

In the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, it is a historical fact that Abraham Lincoln said, "There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

In Patriotism is Not Enough, UC Berkeley Professor of Government Steven Hayward shares that the American people bought into Lincoln's vision—otherwise slavery would have never been eradicated. "They saw that "the principles of the Declaration needed to be honored or else they would ultimately be lost, and the cause of self-government along with them."

These distinctions—the will and moral authority of the people— allow historians to draw real moral lines between great leaders like Lincoln and dictators like Maduro, who waved off free and fair elections by exiling the opposition candidate in Spain last year. Can anyone seriously say that these two countries with these two kinds of governments and political processes are morally equal?

 So Professor James Hankins, who in an article in Compact magazine wrote his reasons for leaving Harvard, was not just making a retirement statement. He was making a clarion call for the Western historical tradition to once again be taught by illuminating facts over ideology. He is calling for the teaching of history as "practical wisdom" to return. For wisdom to be there, the study of facts, the understanding of principles, and the illumination of trends from our advantaged present purview are all necessary. As elite university education further abandons merit and excellence due to its indulgence of woke principles, Hankins is desperate to save it—may his words not go unheeded.

(READ MORE: Notre Dame Faces Push to Uncover Historic Columbus Murals)