At Harvard University today, professors who teach Western history are history.
James Hankins, a specialist in Renaissance thought, was one of the last holdouts.
Now 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’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education.
It’s not the warmer weather that’s drawn him away from Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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—all major figures—through death, retirement or departure for other universities. 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. “When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.”