A professor who spent 40 years teaching at Harvard University torched the Ivy League institution over its “exclusion of white males” in a searing essay announcing his retirement.
In the piece titled “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” history professor James Hankins said his decision to retire “was not a sudden one” and was made back in 2021 after two volatile years on campus, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and George Floyd riots — the latter of which he said dramatically changed the school’s graduate admissions process.
“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.
Harvard
“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,’” he said in the essay published in Compact Magazine.
The professor said in another instance, a white male student he described as “literally the best” at Harvard, who won the prize for the graduating senior with the best overall academic record, was also rejected from all of the school’s graduate programs to which he applied.
“He too was a white male,” Hankins wrote.
“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.
“The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female,” he continued.
Hankins’ last lecture at the storied institution was two weeks ago, after he honored a four-year retirement contract he signed in 2021 that finally expired.
A Harvard spokesperson confirmed to Fox News that, as Hankins noted in his piece, graduate admissions are faculty-led and localized at the department level.
