At Harvard University today, professors who teach Western history are history.

James Hankins, a specialist in Renaissance thought, was one of the last holdouts. Hankins, who has just published a hefty book that teaches what Harvard doesn’t — “The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. Vol. 1” — has decamped for the University of Florida.

It’s not the warmer weather that’s drawn him away from Cambridge, Mass.

It’s the contrast in intellectual climates: Frozen and dead, where Western history is concerned, at Harvard; full of green shoots at the University of Florida.

“We have not hired with tenure a historian in a Western field — ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern — in a decade,” Hankins says about his Harvard department, which in that time “lost eight senior historians in Western fields. I will be the ninth, and I am not expecting to be replaced.”

The loss isn’t just Harvard’s: “The replacement of Western history by global history” has done “serious harm … to the socialization of young Americans,” the historian warns in Compact magazine.

In the 40 years Hankins taught at Harvard, he saw his profession shift its focus from European civilization to cultures once considered barbarian: “In this absurdist rendering of world history, Central Asian peoples,” for example, “are presented as the drivers of cultural innovation, spreading their benign influence east and west via the Silk Road.”

This is marketed as “‘de-centering the West,’ where Western countries are literally put in their place as an ugly growth on the back side of Eurasia.”

A similar standard applies to elite graduate-school admissions, in Hankins’ experience: “I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee” in 2021, he recalls, that “admitting a white male … was ‘not happening this year.'”

As for Harvard’s white male undergraduates, their skin color and sex are obstacles to academic advancement: “(T)he best student at Harvard — he won the prize for the graduating senior with the best overall academic record — was rejected from all the graduate programs to which he applied. He too was a white male,” the historian recounts.

“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.”

Theda Skocpol, Harvard’s Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, is nobody’s idea of a conservative.

In a recent interview published with the journal Sociologica, however, Skocpol acknowledges, “We in the universities … went overboard with trying to boost some groups over others.”

That came in the midst of lowering standards — the average GPA at Harvard is now, notoriously, around 3.8: An A-minus.

But how seriously should taxpayers take a professor like Skocpol when she says, “I believe in actual equality, applying the same standards to everyone, not using special quotas or excuses for particular groups”?

Not very seriously, when in the same interview she says Trump administration officials cracking down on the academy’s follies “all resent some woman — particularly some Black woman –who told them what to do or who got what they think they deserved.”

Harvard’s last president, Claudine Gay, was a Black woman whose scholarship was infected with plagiarism. She’s still employed by Harvard.

The contrast between Gay’s treatment as a Black woman and the white male students with exemplary records who have been discriminated against should make even a Theda Skocpol question her premises about why conservatives criticize higher ed.

Harvard and its peers have replaced Western history with global history — and merit with identity politics.

If scholars of Hankins’ caliber keep migrating to the freer and fairer setting of places like Florida, Harvard will at last find itself replaced, too.