***The following article has taken on a life of its own since it’s initial publication. For recent context on it and the reactions it spawned, read my new post “The Good, the True, and the Viral” (March 25, 2026).
Originally published in Compact, December 29, 2025, under the title “Why I’m Leaving Harvard”
Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I have been a history professor for forty years. My four decades of experience at one of the world’s leading universities have given me a unique vantage point to trace the replacement of Western history by global history. This change is part of the reason why the younger generation finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation.
My decision to retire was not a sudden one. I am coming to the end of a four-year retirement contract that I signed in the fall of 2021. That year I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime. This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country’s uncritical acceptance of The Science and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education.
The year earlier the university had collectively taken a knee during the Summer of Floyd. This turned out not to be empty virtue-signalling, as I expected, but had serious consequences for the way we conducted our affairs. 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. 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.” In the same year a certifiably brilliant undergraduate I had tutored, who was literally the 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. 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.
Harvard, I believe, is now on a better course under its current president, Alan Garber. The reaction to the Claudine Gay fiasco, which highlighted the university’s shocking indifference to the anti-Semitic demonstrations following the October 7 atrocities, compelled the Harvard Corporation, which chooses the president, to seek out a safe pair of hands. President Garber, our provost for over a decade, provided them. Even so, I believe I can make far better use of my time and experience at my new institutional home—the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida—than at Harvard. The reason why is that the Hamilton School is committed to teaching the history of Western civilization. When late liberal pedagogy replaced Western civilization courses with global history, serious harm was done to the socialization of young Americans. When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.
Despite the Garber administration’s recent efforts to depoliticize Harvard and to focus once more on its core mission, the project of renewing the study of the Western tradition is not, I think, one that I can pursue as a member of Harvard’s history department. The evidence of recent hiring patterns speaks for itself. We have not hired with tenure a historian in a Western field—ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern—in a decade; the last promotion to tenure from the junior ranks occurred in 2012. A couple of short-term post-doctoral lecturers have come and gone. As has now become common practice in academe, ancient history has been outsourced to the Classics department. Meanwhile, the department has lost eight senior historians in Western fields—all major figures—through death, retirement, or departure for other universities. I will be the ninth, and I am not expecting to be replaced.
It is hard to avoid the impression that, whether through hostility or neglect, Western history is being phased out or allowed to die on the vine at Harvard. My remaining colleagues in Western history are mostly distinguished specialists, but new blood is not flowing in. Meanwhile, the Hamilton School, founded only four years ago, has almost miraculously hired forty-eight outstanding scholars. Twenty-eight of them are historians in Western fields, not counting the twelve in American history. They come from outstanding programs—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge among them—with impressive records of publication. Many come from among the dreaded population of white males whose intersectional scores were too low for employment in legacy universities. The women profs Hamilton snapped up work on subjects disfavored by liberal history departments, which prefer to stockpile yet more historians of race, colonialism, gender and sexuality, and the environment.
Many of my colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere will no doubt respond that to write about the “death of Western history” is misleading at best, overly dramatic and attention-seeking at worst. The course catalogues of the “Ivy Plus” schools and the leading state universities, they might well point out, pullulate with courses on, or related to, Western history. At Harvard, students may not be able to take courses on the Reformation, the French Revolution, the English Civil War, or the Enlightenment; courses on political, diplomatic, and military history are thin on the ground; but they can take many other courses about the West. Why fetishize those stodgy, traditional subjects? Why do I want to privilege Western history, challenging the sacred principles of diversity and multiculturalism? Why do I insist that some fields are more central to our mission and deserve more study than others? Why do I want to narrow our students’ vision from a global perspective to a merely civilizational one? Can I (God forbid) really believe that it’s more important for Harvard students to learn about Western history than about Chinese or South Asian or sub-Saharan African history?
Well, yes. But questions of this sort reveal the deeper reasons why a liberal political environment is not the best place to revive the study of the West. This will be more evident to readers, I believe, if I take a step further back in time and discuss how the study of history has evolved at Harvard over the last forty years, and why Western history has fallen into neglect. Though my old department tends to be a follower rather than an innovator when it comes to historiographical trends, it provides a useful case study in the pathologies that have spread everywhere in recent decades, affecting both pedagogy and research priorities.
When I first arrived at Harvard as an assistant professor in 1985, the overall political complexion of the department, I suppose, was liberal, but there was a solid contingent of conservatives whose mere presence prevented politicization. The ethic of collegiality was (and is) so strong in academe that any semblance of balance in political tempers tends to prevent departments from descending into hyperpartisanship. At the time, in the mid-80s, my department’s conservatives included Stephen Thernstrom, Ernst Badian, Steven Ozment (my mentor), Philip Kuhn, Richard Pipes (who had worked in the Reagan administration) and Donald Fleming—all now deceased. There were also what I call “disciplinary conservatives,” colleagues whose politics were opaque but who were determined not to let professional standards be compromised by academic fashions, especially those that had arisen at universities other than Harvard. I remember the word “problematic,” now universally used in academe as a synonym for undesirable, being derided as a “Princeton term.” Disciplinary conservatives included figures like the British historian Wallace McCaffrey and Bernard Bailyn, widely agreed to be the finest American historians of his time. Bailyn was indeed on record as regarding all forms of political activity as intellectually second-rate in contrast with the high calling of history.
In that period, teaching was a low priority, but colleagues were more frank about neglecting it than they are now. Another of my mentors, the Russianist Ned Keenan, who had once served as dean of the graduate school, was famous for his declaration at a full faculty meeting that “this faculty does not choose to have its research priorities dictated by the intellectual interests of 18-year olds.” This statement was greeted with rapturous applause. Translated, it meant that teaching your next book was more valuable to the institution than providing basic courses and surveys for undergraduates. These unpleasant tasks could be unloaded on junior faculty and temporary instructors. Too much interest in pedagogy was seen as a sign of waning success in one’s research field or of a servile attitude to university administrators, who were always going on about teaching standards, advising, grade inflation, and things of that sort.
In the Harvard of the 1980s, senior faculty also tended to keep their juniors at arm’s length. When I was tenured in 1992, I was advised not to associate too closely with the untenured. It was Harvard’s practice not to promote junior faculty but to send them out to the provinces to win reputation before returning in glory to Harvard. Too close a relationship with junior faculty was likely to end painfully. I was in fact an anomaly: the first junior professor to be promoted from within for over two decades. Senior appointments at Harvard in the ’80s and early ’90s observed the “two-book” standard. It was expected that the first book would be a published version of the dissertation. The second was supposed to be a “field-defining book.” This was a book that everyone in the candidate’s subfield had to read and that would go immediately onto graduate reading lists—the books read by doctoral candidates when preparing fields for examination. The candidate for promotion, in other words, had to have at least the beginnings of a national reputation. As my late Harvard colleague Mark Kishlansky used to remark: “When a new senior appointment at Harvard is announced, what you expect to hear is, ‘Not him!’ What you don’t want to hear is, ‘Who?’”