WTW113: Harvard Professor Announces His Exit Because History Dept. Needs More White Classes
Harvard professor James Hankins, retiring after 40 years, blames "woke" DEI policies for replacing Western history with global studies, citing a 1967–2019 drop in history majors from 5.7% to 1.2%. He claims Harvard’s 1990s tenure reforms—abandoning the "two-book rule"—favored women, though peer-review delays for female researchers contradict his bias claims. His move to Florida’s Hamilton School reflects a broader clash: critics dismiss his "anti-Western" framing as white supremacist dogma, while his past remarks on feminists and date rape resurface, exposing hypocrisy in his defense of academic rigor. The episode exposes how curriculum wars mirror deeper tensions over equity, privilege, and the future of higher education. [Automatically generated summary]
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming?
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic can sound.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything, everything, everything, everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas Dead over.
There's Lydia.
How you doing?
Hello.
I am doing great because I'm excited to talk about a crazy professor.
It's been a while since I've gotten to go down that kind of rabbit hole.
That's right.
Look at the crazy professor show.
Might as well be called.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This guy's interesting.
Oh, man.
Let me just tease it a little bit before we dig into the meat.
This crossed, man.
I think it was maybe like one of my Google alerts or something like that for woke, like anyone who uses the term woke.
Professor asshole is an asshole.
Just a bunch of alerts on that.
Yeah.
But these damn kids can't understood woke.
But this is titled Why I'm Leaving Harvard.
And it's published in Compact, which is like an online magazine that is severely paywalled.
And I tried so hard to access this article without paying for it and I couldn't.
And I was like, I have to know what this freaking thing says.
So I signed up for Compact for about a month and then I canceled it.
But yeah, well, it's heavily conservative magazine.
I like the idea of it being heavily paywalled.
Like you had to pay like three different severely paywalled.
Yes.
Yeah.
It felt that way to me, honestly, but it didn't disappoint.
I sit here poorer for having done it, but richer in some ways too, because I think we have some really good material for today.
And it sent me in an exploration of academia and tenure and the classics, of course.
So I think we have a lot of fun stuff to talk about today.
Oh, man.
I don't even know.
So someone's leaving Harvard over it being too woke, I'm sure.
Kind of sort of, yeah.
Okay.
Can't wait.
I love that.
Classically woke university, Harvard.
Famously woke.
Can't wait to hear it.
Should I push play on the podcast?
Not yet, because we have to let people know that if they want.
If you want to support Lydia's habit of subscribing to have severely, severely paywalled.
Intensely.
Intensely overwhelmingly conservative BS crap, then go to patreon.com slash where there's woke and 100% of your donation will go to conservative media.
That's exactly.
No, sorry.
No, no.
98% of your donation.
No, just kidding.
Patreon.com slash Where There's Woke.
Thank you for supporting everybody.
We love you.
And we'll take a break and get to it.
All right.
So an asshole says what?
Yeah, exactly.
So I'm going to start off with part of his article.
I think we're going to read quite a bit more of it, but there's a lot that we're going to want to break down.
So just kicking it off, this came out end of December and so many things were going on, but I was like, oh, I got to hold on to this.
I need to do this article.
So it starts off.
Two weeks ago, I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I've been a history professor for 40 years.
I don't even think I said his name.
His name is James Hankins, and we'll hear from him soon.
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.
Just had a thought that, like, this is this guy's retirement plan.
Like, he didn't save for his pension or whatever.
He's like, Yeah.
Oh, I've been here 40 years.
Shit.
I don't have an ounce.
I don't have a dollar to my name in retirement.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I quit after 40 years.
The Ywoke kids have made me quit.
Just like, that's his way.
So funny.
Bankrolling.
So I have theories about this too.
And you'll hear it in about two more sentences.
I imagine his financial advisor going, okay, I think you should do this.
There's a lot of money in the right wing.
This change is part of the reason why the younger generation finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation.
Sure, the hell isn't.
Sorry, the fact that we're not reading that we're not doing Western Civ as much as we're doing global history.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Because the global is the globe is just moral turpitude.
Yeah.
But any other culture except Western culture is immoral.
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.
And so then he gives reasons for this.
One of the things, well, okay, I'll have you guess.
What do you think sparked his decision that he wanted to leave Harvard?
Was four years ago the Israel thing already?
No.
Oh, okay.
2021 is what we're looking at.
President Biden?
I don't know.
So it was COVID, their COVID requirements.
Oh, really?
Oh, geez.
And I've like moved past that in my brain, like that anyone could still have.
Okay.
Yeah.
So he says, 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 and capitalized the science and its proclivity when backed by public power for tyrannous invasions on private.
I cannot stop hearing you idiots criticize it.
It's been five years.
Keep going.
It's still every day.
We're hearing about it now from you.
Criticize the response to COVID that happened for two seconds until everyone quit.
Yeah.
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.
Uh-huh.
There is a pandemic, you see.
There's another reason why he decided to retire.
What do you think the other reason is?
God, I don't, what?
I don't know.
Beyond just the locusts, I don't know.
The year earlier, the university had collectively taken a knee during the in Capitals Summer of Floyd.
The summer of Floyd.
The summer of Floyd.
Yes.
Okay.
So this is a throwback.
I think what's killing me is somebody being on the time delay of like four years ago, I signed a retirement contract.
Exactly.
I have to go back to like four years ago's stuff, and I'm just not in that mindset right now.
I think that's so interesting.
Like this idea that I signed a retirement contract four years ago, and I've had four years to plot how I'm going to write this.
Well, my question was going to be, has he written this a bunch of times?
But like, was he not allowed to talk about it?
We don't have the details.
We don't know.
I mean, like, was he not allowed to announce that he was retiring or not?
You know, like, wouldn't he have already done?
He could have already done an article that was like, I'm going to retire because of this bullshit.
I will say he doesn't actually have like a huge online presence.
He contributed to Harvard Crimson, their, you know, student newspaper once, and it was about pushing back on ending legacy admissions.
So he wrote a piece about that.
Another great take.
The only other time I really see him in the Harvard Crimson, besides this piece, and we'll get into where he is now, is a 1991 article.
History prof. Consent is too high.
History prof denies charges of sexism.
So, you know, we can get into that later.
That was him writing about another professor, right?
Yeah.
No.
He did some reporting on a different professor.
Yeah.
He allegedly said, quote, feminists have invented sexual harassment and date rape in order to gain dominance in our society.
Date rape.
Yeah.
That's it.
Wow.
One of the students said, I turned around after the comment and every girl in the class was sitting there with her jaw dropped, including my section leader.
Male student in the class said people took it that he was saying that date rape and sexual harassment are kind of being made up in a sense.
It sounded really bad.
Holy crap.
And then apparently in response, Hankins during the class said, I hope one of you won't report me to the Dean of Political Correctness.
Oh my God.
What year?
1991.
Oh my God.
These idiots have been doing this forever.
So consistent.
It's nothing new.
It's the same bullshit.
How did he not get fired then?
Yeah.
Well, so here's his.
Nothing ever happens this year.
Nothing ever happens.
Here's his statement in response.
I use the word invented, and that was the origin of the problem.
Feminists do claim to have invented the concept of date rape, but the reality is there and has always been there.
People thought I was denying the reality of date rape, which I don't deny.
I didn't say that feminists use this as a way of controlling the world or anything like that.
This is a natural reaction of the female sex to get control of its relationships again after the anarchy of the sexual revolution.
Yeah.
I always love the, yeah, keep explaining.
Keep explaining what you were thinking.
I'm sure it will make it all better.
He explicitly said, I'm not going to make an apology because I don't think there's anything to apologize for, but I am going to explain tomorrow what I meant.
And then, of course, he later goes on to say, he said that his own wife, quote, has been sexually exploited a lot.
So a lot.
Yeah.
Trying to like indicate like, no, this is serious to me because my wife has been sexually exploited a lot.
She's been sexually exploited a lot.
Yeah.
A lot.
Exactly.
This is back 1991.
She's been sexually exploited.
Not just a little bit either.
Not just like one of you, Johnny Cum lately.
God, that is so dark.
Jesus, these people.
I know.
I know.
It's incredible.
So during the summer of Floyd for him, I think another piece of this that pushed him over the edge was.
Hey, dude.
Hey, dude.
You were already over the edge.
I just heard your take from the years when George Bush Sr. was in office for Operation Desert Storm.
I heard you were already over the edge.
You didn't need to be put over the edge.
You were already there.
You're an asshole.
Yeah.
You've always been an asshole forever.
So he thought that the way that Harvard responded in the wake of George Floyd's murder was going to be virtue signaling.
So he wasn't like initially really concerned with it.
Oh, I guess.
Like he thought it was going to be like, oh, Harvard, you know, just kind of like pretending or whatever.
And then he was on the receiving end of this because, quote, 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, quote, that, meaning admitting a white male, was quote, not happening this year.
No.
Yeah.
So there were no, no white males were admitted that year, I guess, if we checked the records.
And that's one of the biggest things.
I like spent so much time looking at demographics of this is the history department.
It is historically incredibly white, incredibly male.
And this has been a pervasive problem for decades.
And like, you know, the various organizations around history scholarship have been trying to find ways to expand this.
And little pin in this, teaching history related to other countries.
Don't tell your students that date rape is made up by feminists.
That would be just to get more women involved.
You know, that would be one way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also teaching history relevant to other people and their heritage, I think is also a way to encourage that.
So this is something that really, really bothered him.
He said that an undergraduate that he had tutored at school, he said, who was literally the best student at Harvard, was rejected from all of the graduate programs to which he applied.
He too was a white male who had applied to various graduate programs.
I don't know that he necessarily applied to Harvard.
I don't see anywhere that he applied to Harvard.
So James Hankin position wouldn't matter.
Yes.
He said he had tutored himself.
Elsewhere and they didn't get in.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected.
Everywhere it was the same story from probably all of his white friends.
Graduates.
This is made up.
This is not real.
Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours.
And then he said the one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female.
So that's so weird.
So if we go to the records, we'll see that there just aren't white men in college at that time.
Like they're just, they don't all of a sudden, isn't it weird that every university just all of a sudden there weren't white people there?
It was alarming.
I got to say.
Yeah.
I'm on this guy's side.
He goes on to talk about where he's going.
Do you have an idea of where you might be going?
Well, so he's not quitting teaching.
He's not retiring as a professor.
He's just moving to a different school.
And I think we have a couple choices here.
Yeah, Hills.
Yeah.
What state do you think he's going to end up in?
Florida?
Yeah, Florida.
Is he going to the stupid university?
No, not New College.
He's going to University of Florida because they established the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education.
So this is under Ben Fast.
Like, we're going to reclaim our word.
You're not allowed to use that word.
It's ours.
It's ours.
He says, 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.
The Decline in History Majors00:05:26
When you don't teach the young what civilization is, it turns out people become uncivilized.
Wow.
And I was aghast when I read that sentence.
I was like, Jesus Christ.
So before we dig into talking about like Western civ courses and stuff like that, because I think we should talk about that, I want to hear from the man himself when he gave an interview to, wouldn't you know it, Prager You.
So why should the American people care that an institution like Harvard University is no longer prioritizing the teachings and virtues of Western civilization?
What I'm talking about is the failure to replace anybody.
That looks exactly like what you would think.
Somebody has decided that we're going to not hire any more Western people.
What?
And instead, they're hiring more global historians of various kinds.
So this is important if they have wanted for well 30 years to go in the direction of global history, international history, transnational history.
Okay.
So what that means is that if you're studying the West at all, you're normally studying empires and colonialism and things like that.
You're not studying the French Revolution.
You're not studying the Enlightenment or the Reformation or the English Civil Wars.
We don't have any courses in those things.
There's no American History Survey.
There's no Western history surveys.
So basically, European history has the number of students who are taking these history classes.
I didn't take a history class in college.
Like not a one.
How many people, like the, maybe you have some gen ed and maybe he could make the argument that like, oh, now they're the gen ed is not like that.
And so that, but it's kind of a, it's, it's tough to try to make the argument that like civilization itself hinges on like a general education course that maybe some students take because those aren't required.
You usually take different ones in different subjects.
I had, again, not a one in history.
Nothing.
I hate history or I hated, I hated history just as a class.
Like I wasn't good at it.
I was interested and I'm more interested than ever in history itself, but I just was not good like class.
Yeah.
So I was like, well, no fucking way I'm taking that.
And I just didn't.
And the number of students who take a history course might be some amount.
What could it be?
10%, 20%.
But the amount who take more than one to the point where it like even matters, you know, like it's an actual focus of what they're doing, it's got to be a fraction of a fraction of college students.
Yeah.
So I found an article on historians.org.
This is a serious problem for people who care about history and academia.
The decline in history majors.
Oh, yeah, yeah, fair.
It is really, really bad.
The article starts out.
History has a majors problem.
It's fallen precipitously after the Great Recession of 2008.
It's improved a little bit, but usually what you see is double majors, right?
You don't see a dedicated history major, which I think is fine.
I don't think it's a problem to double major.
I think that's really great.
I wish I had double majored in something because I just wanted to get out of college.
I think that's a lot of jobs, I imagine, where people are like, so, and specifically after that time, when people get way more sensitive about like, oh shit, I got to do something that makes money.
Yeah.
So it says in 1967, okay, if we go all the way back, history accounted for back when this guy was a young, budding racist piece of shit, KKK member.
History accounted for 5.7% of all bachelor's degrees.
And that's like the heyday.
That was the heyday.
And so as of 2019, it was slightly less than 1.2% of all bachelor's degrees.
And again, like that could include people who are double majoring.
So it's something where they do struggle to have people pursuing this major.
I hear all that, but just from the structure, like if you're just a person hearing this guy, I think that a lot of people, and I myself for a second, went into the mindset of like, oh, yeah, we're not teaching kids history, but he's a professor at fucking Harvard.
Like it would be one thing if you were trying to say, and they all, I know they also do try to say this, but I'm taking this guy's arguments.
If you're trying to say like, oh, well, you know, in elementary school, they're only teaching the blah, blah, blah.
You'd be like, oh, okay.
Well, that's affecting kids, I guess.
This is like nobody is affected by it.
Like fucking nobody is affected by the choices of history taught at universities.
The only people who are are a select group of people who want to do that.
And they should be exposed to a bunch of different history.
That's probably good.
That is not all.
If you want to try to pin like the collapse of our civilization on a class that 1.2% of people take maybe, you know, like, and, and that class being slightly different than it was, it's just silly.
It's so hysterical.
Yeah.
It's also, I think, one of the things too, that he really gets hung up on is, you know, that we had mentioned before is global history and the ideas there.
But again, I love to reiterate.
It's either Western or global.
Right.
Right.
You said French Revolution.
I was like, well, that sounds global, but no, but no, they're one of the good ones.
Color Coding Controversies00:04:43
White people.
Yeah.
And they also like to claim race in Rome.
Which is closer to us.
Yeah.
France or South America.
Yeah.
Just, I'm not very good at this stuff, but like you would think that would be more relevant, like just spatially.
And we are way more involved, way more as a country in a lot of their history recently that's important.
Yeah.
I don't know shit about that because no one teaches it.
Yeah.
But history has also been one of the least diverse disciplines in all of academia.
You know, I'm just looking at this graph here and I'll just send you this screenshot because I think this guy looks like someone did an amalgamation like overlay of every history professor, like every college student.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's like all distorted and weird.
He's not AI.
He's not a good looking man.
Sorry to look Shane, but he looks like the racist he is.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So this image is how stark the difference is in the racial makeup of history.
Yeah, we got a line graph and what it looks like to me is you've got one line ironically that's brown that's white people.
Yeah, white non-history.
I love that choice.
You know, sometimes when I'm doing recordings, I do the track colors and I'm like, should I make the only girl pink in the track?
No, I can't.
But sometimes I do because I feel like you would like the nice lavenderish color that, or no, what is that?
It's like a pink, whatever.
I don't know what that is, but I'll assume you're right because I don't know what that color is.
It's like that, but they've decided the white people line needs to be brown.
I'm going to go with that this is an unfortunate.
Hey, the Asian one is yellow.
Just in case anyone was wondering, the Asian line is yellow.
This is an article, though, about like how we need to fix the diversity problem.
So I'm going to think that this is like an Excel, you know, like it's a tough, you're literally painted into a corner.
Like it's a tough, it's a tough choice.
Like, how do we just, my first thing would have been Asian is not yellow.
Like that would have been my first, like, okay.
I will say, had I prepared this chart, that's something I would have fixed.
I would have like done an Excel, you know, like the automatic color selector, and then I would have been like, really good skit if no one's ever done it.
Like, it's almost like, remember that weird comedy skit you see?
Well, I, people will probably know this, but I only ever see it in like meme form where the guy's talking about the abbreviations for the states or whatever.
That's like kind of funny.
I don't know if you know that one.
Okay.
It would be like a that, but for like figuring out which color the lines are going to be for each race.
And you're like, okay, well, white can't be white because the graph is white.
Okay, that doesn't work.
So it can't be, you can't go literal.
Oh, Asian, we can't do yellow.
And then like by the time you piece it all together, you're stuck with some really tough decisions.
Yeah.
I would just go all neon craziness colors.
Like go, you know, like make it all colors that are never associated with human beings in any way.
Like that's what I would do.
Different, like just bright like purples and pinks and, you know, just like all just aliens.
Yeah.
But anyway, the joke I started to say is what this looks like is a graph that has one line that's the white people one that's brown.
And then the rest is like, here's the other colors we would use if anyone was in.
Here's the color.
Here's the crayons that we have ready.
If anyone else ever graduates with a history degree, that isn't white.
That's what it looks like.
Yeah.
It is pretty shocking how stark the contrast is here.
So over time, you know, this goes back to 1997.
We have just over 20,000 degrees awarded to white people.
And we have fewer than 2,500 for the other races of the categories, right?
So we have Hispanic or Latino is one of them, Black or African American, other or unknown, Asian, non-Hispanic.
Temporary visa holder has its own line here, which I think is interesting.
I've never heard of that country.
Yeah.
And then American Indian.
Because we are taught the history of the temporary visa holder country that we probably bombed at some point.
But one thing I also want to point out here, well, we see a huge increase in, you know, around 2005, six, seven in degrees awarded.
We're, you know, getting closer to 30,000 for just white people getting history degrees.
And then it sort of like plateaus a little bit.
Like an Iraq war boom or something?
That's what I was wondering that, yeah, maybe it was related to that.
Let's learn about the countries we're bombing.
What do you mean that we shouldn't be doing this?
I feel like I've missed a lot in my high school history courses.
And then the drop come 2013.
The only demographic that's really grown over time is the Hispanic population pursuing history degrees.
A lot of that's probably just like population dynamics, I imagine.
Bias Against Female Authors00:08:03
Yeah, it could be.
Because a lot of this also, I was going to wonder if the surge in 2001 and 3 is also just like a college attendance surge a little bit.
Oh, right.
I think things were going well, like dot-com era into like some pretty good economic stuff until the economic collapse.
And that's like the peak.
So it could just be that as well.
But it also, so like this isn't like controlled for anything, right?
So it's just like, no, no.
This is just numbers.
Just pretty straightforward numbers.
Yeah.
So who knows?
Anyway, point is one way or the other, the point is it's all white people.
Yeah.
And then there's always been a pervasive gender disparity in history departments as well, which this article points out is, you know, really unfortunate because humanities disciplines women were involved in history too.
Yeah.
Humanities disciplines tend to be kind of flipped the other way where they have more women representation in them, even just bachelor's degrees in general, at or near 57% for women receiving bachelor's degrees as compared to men.
But in history, the highest it's ever gotten is 42%.
And it's, you know, been around 40, 41%.
And they can't make gains there, whatever they do.
And so, you know, we don't know why from this article.
Maybe dinosaurs like this racist piece of shit.
Maybe.
Could be.
But something clearly isn't working.
And start by getting rid of this asshole particularly.
But he has some thoughts on women in this field.
I can't wait.
My wife's been sexually exploited a ton.
What was it again?
God, that question.
Yeah, that's pretty.
My wife has been sexually exploited a lot.
A lot.
Yeah.
A lot of times.
So perfect, this guy.
That's the most awful thing.
Because it's like, it's so not specific.
Like he clearly hasn't listened during whatever the story was or something.
Oh, yeah.
She tells, she always talks about how she was sexually exploited.
Like what?
It's so like if I were going to talk about anything like that involving you, I'd be a bit more sensitive than being like, yeah, just, oh man, like seven, like tons.
I just also like to be his wife and to like have it cited in like the student newspaper and be like, I didn't say that was okay.
I know, but somehow they always are okay with it or something.
I don't do, I never understand that.
I always expect that like next headline is logical asshole kicked out of house immediately and divorced.
And then it's always like, no, she's, I don't know what it is.
Do they just like, I think they just like pretend it doesn't exist, these women sometimes?
Or they're just like, well, I'm married to this guy.
Either they're that, they're as shitty as the guy or they're just like, I'm just going to tune it out.
Yeah.
Yeah, it could be.
It's weird.
I think that's the way to prevent politicization from within.
So you just said you were against quotas of women, which actually brings me to my next question.
I want to read you another quote, and I want to make sure I get this right.
You had said in the article, quote, there was a two-book standard at Harvard.
The two-book standard meant that staff were expected to have published two books proving their expertise in a subject area.
The two book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty.
Feminist activists at Harvard, as elsewhere, were demanding that half of all new appointments be women.
That, they claimed, was what liberal standards of equality required.
So I guess when thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI, do you think this is something that we can mend or something we have to end?
Is there any way that we can have more inclusive environments without DEI?
I mean, how do you see DEI within contemporary higher education?
Well, DEI is a later phenomenon.
What was the reigning philosophy of Harvard in this period was multiculturalism.
The two books were not.
What does that have to do with women quoting the department?
Women are not a culture.
Everyone told me that I would never get tenure because no one got tenure.
But if you wanted to get tenure, you have to write two books, one of which is your dissertation and the other is a major book of some kind, a field-changing book.
That was the word people used.
And that standard was openly acknowledged in depart meetings, but there just weren't enough women, right?
At that time, the history profession was about 10% female at most.
The recent PhDs coming out were 10% women.
And in the cohorts where we hire at Harvard, which is usually hired mid-career from outside, there are even fewer women in that.
We happened to get a wonderful female historian, by the way, named Laurel.
She's been sexually exploited at a time.
Who I like very much and wrote wonderful history.
But that's because we're Harvard.
We couldn't.
So yeah, one of the good ones.
But the idea that we got the one.
When the cohort of available PhDs is 10% means automatically you're going to lower standards, right?
Oh, yeah.
It's mathematically impossible not to lower standards.
You're not a math professor.
Well, no, it's actually the opp.
That's actually the opposite of true because I mean, there's, okay, just speaking, obviously this guy's full of shit in every different way, but like speaking mathematically, just for fun to entertain this stupid thing, you could argue that like if you have to open something up to more people, hypothetically, you could, there's an intuitive sense in which you're like, oh, that would mean you're reducing standards.
If the candidate pool overwhelms the number of positions you have, then opening your position, which it does, obviously, like how many professors are we talking about?
Like how many job openings are we talking about here?
I mean, a dozen?
Yeah, maybe at most.
So, and if you're, let's say right now, I don't know what it is.
Let's say it's fucking, it can't be that many, right?
Because there aren't that many majors.
So let's say there's fucking five professors and it's four men and one woman.
And so do you really expect me to believe, Mr. Idiot, that changing that from, say, like a five, let's say it's six and a five and one, changing that to a three in three is you're going to have to dramatically to have two additional professors that are women.
You're going to have, because there was only one qualified woman in the whole world.
And now you're going to have to go down to the next tier to get two more.
And if I'm wrong, it's not by much.
Let's say it's 20.
Like what it's nothing.
I mean, if you count like, I don't know, every different kind of position within the department or something, let's say, for example, what could you have?
20?
30?
It's like nothing.
Yeah, I looked at their faculty.
So these ideas here that you can't, these are very exclusive places.
And so you're already getting the best of the best.
There isn't a perfect mathematical linear model of quote unquote how qualified professors are that goes in number order and you have to dip down to a different, no, it's a bunch of people at this level, the Harvard level, it's a bunch of people who are 10 out of 10.
Yeah.
So you just, instead of only gatekeeping out the 10 out of 10s who are women, you get the 10 out of 10s who are women and then you don't get some of the maybe 10 out of 10s, although I don't think they're sending their best evidence by this.
I hate even saying that with this guy, but yeah, it's elitely qualified people.
It's the same thing with like the president where it's like, they're like, we're going to have to reduce our standards.
It's like, what?
It's one person.
Like you could have the highest standards ever.
And I want to be clear too about specifically what he was complaining about here was the idea of getting rid of this two book standard as part of tenure.
And in his piece, he says that standards being lowered by getting rid of this two book expectation.
Bias Against Female Authors00:03:01
Feminists denied vociferously that this was happening.
The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship.
Those who took the opposite view were branded as sexists.
I was myself identified as a sexist when I opposed quotas as a member of the faculty council and on history department committees.
Wait, who is that?
This is James Hankins still.
Oh, okay.
So one of the things that I think is interesting to discuss here too is this is actually a new study that came out last week.
And there is research demonstrating that scientific papers by women take longer to publish.
There is bias against female authorship.
So when a woman is listed as the first author on a scientific paper, and granted, you know, I'm not talking history here, but we see the same issues in publishing as well.
It takes longer for that paper to move through peer review and reach publication than when a man is listed as the first author.
And they looked at millions of biomedical research articles to come to this conclusion.
And they said it's not just that it like delays your paper from being published.
It ends up having a compounding effect over time where it slows your ability to put out more research.
So your production slows now and now your CV is slowing down, right?
You have fewer articles that you're able to say published on your ability to seek jobs.
So these are very, very real things.
It compounds.
It's harder to publish as well.
I was just going to say that already.
Like there's fewer women that are in the field itself.
There's fewer.
It's harder to, you know, often it's like you have to get co-authors.
It's going to be harder for the women to get the, you know, to do all that stuff.
It's just going to compound.
And it doesn't take much in those kinds of systems, like a little bit of bias and there might be a lot of bias, but like it only takes a little bit to over time, like really offset that because it compounds on itself.
Like it makes it harder on one stage, which makes it harder on the next stage, which makes it harder on the next stage.
And multiply that by 30 years.
And it's like, yeah, okay, there's women have way less published.
Yeah.
I think they found anywhere between 7.4 to 14.6% longer for women publications, women-led publications.
And that's right.
So just isolating the variable of like, it's a woman on it.
It is a woman as a first author.
It says first author, corresponding author, or both.
And that was the median time difference there.
And as James Hankins would agree, publication output is a way to measure success in academia for better or for worse, right?
And they make decisions about funding.
They make decisions about hiring, about promotion, about access to tenure, all depending on how frequently you're publishing.
So it's not just like that one paper.
We're talking about entire careers, not to mention just what women experience in the workplace anyway, which is a lot of women leave the workplace when they're trying to start families or they have older family members that need a caregiver.
That disproportionately falls on women.
Discrimination's Complicated Remedy00:07:27
And it is impossible to do all of those things.
So women often have to make those tough decisions.
And that's the same thing in academia as well.
Yeah.
Obviously.
I want to go back a little bit because he decides he's going to quote Ibram X. Kendi.
He's talking about the issue of discrimination and him as a white man.
Dude, look at the graph, man.
Look at the graph.
How could you look at the graph of all the different, like of how overwhelmingly white male this is and start complaining about how unfair it is to you as a white man?
Like it's just, it's just fucking psychotic, these people.
So if you go back to 513.
We're never going to get through this fucking thing.
And play it in slow motion, please.
Yeah.
You know, why, why wasn't he LeN?
And everyone's humming and hauling and say, well, you know, it's a difficult year.
It's George Floyd and restorative justice.
I mean, restorative justice is this idea, a totally crazy idea that since certain protected minorities were discriminated against 100 years ago or 50 years ago.
Apparently now.
We have to make things good by discriminating against other people today.
So we're going to discriminate against white males because the white males were responsible for the sufferings of black people.
No part of that is true.
You're not even representing the problem correctly, even if you disagreed with the solution.
It's being unjust in the present to balance out injustice of the past.
And he said history.
Sorry, injustice plus injustice does not make justice, but that's the way people think.
It's even actually quite explicit.
If you know who Ibram Kendi is, right?
Ibram X. Kendi.
Yeah, I know who that is.
I don't know who the fuck he is.
He's the author of all these anti-racism books.
Yeah, all of these.
So I was doing, I was all these anti-racism books.
And somebody actually sent me a screenshot from his book where he says exactly that.
We must discriminate against white people now in the present because we were discriminated against the people who are.
He's getting the, like, I just can't even let him finish.
Again, it's not, like, it just goes to show how little mental effort these racists put into understanding black people's arguments or women's arguments or people of color's argument, any minorities' arguments, essentially, because they don't have to care.
They don't have to put any effort into it.
They can just smear it and all of their fellow white jack off professors are going to, and these people with money and power making these fake universities and all this stuff, they're just going to give them nothing but rounds of applause and money and deals and whatever.
And they don't have to even look into it.
Oh, yeah.
It's absolutely true that in order to remedy the current situation, you would have to, in a sense, take away some of the privilege of white people.
But to present it as though like it's a tit for tat like revenge.
Right, exactly.
That's what he's saying.
Like, oh, in order to make up, like, you got to hit me so I get to hit you.
It's like, no, it's that there's no people of color and women in these fields because they weren't let in.
Yeah.
So you'd have to let them in.
Like that's what you have to do.
Like there's this old thing from one of these, you know, one of those anti-racism books.
No, this was actually from a feminism book I read 10 fucking years ago now that I think about it.
Maybe it was, God, it was around, man, I read a lot of such really good books around the first time Trump was elected, like really good, like feminist books.
And I'm realizing it's been so long that I like really can't remember which is what.
But it's just a lot of really good thoughts.
And one of the things that they talked about was, you know, Harvard at one point, or I think it was Harvard.
It was either Harvard or something like that was, you know, for a long time was all men.
You know, Yale, one of the things, like whatever it is, it's one of these elite.
Professorships, yeah.
No, attendance.
Oh, attendance.
Only men were allowed to attend these colleges.
And the whole argument was, well, if you're going to, cause like the Supreme Court or something, someone made them do it.
Like you have to let women in.
Something that I think even these, well, we're regressing quickly, but even these assholes would at least acknowledge that you shouldn't ban women from attending.
And once that happened, what they said was, well, what are we going to tell the men who now don't get to get, you're going to have to not let in so many men.
So many men.
Yeah.
You're going to have to screw over.
You have to discriminate against men who did have all these slots.
Yeah.
And now what are you going to do?
Well, because the pond is actually bigger than the way that you've artificially made it.
Yeah.
And so now you have to actually compete, compete more then.
It's absurd, but it highlighted the absurdity of it, which is like, oh, yeah, those aren't their spots.
You know, you think of them as their spots because that's been the injustice.
Because historically they have sat in those seats.
In the same way that we compensated fucking slave owners and not slaves for, you know, taking away their property.
You think of it as that.
But it's like, if Harvard was all people named Jeff and you're like, hey, Supreme Court says we have to let in other students that aren't named Jeff, there'd be a bunch of Jeffs who are like, what about all the Jeffs who are going to take away their spot?
It's like, yeah, whatever you have, you think is you're just entitled to forever.
Now, before we move on from this, I do want to just say the actual quote from how to be an anti-racist.
Oh, no, that's pretty much where that bit ends.
But Kendi says, quote, the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination.
The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman wrote in 1978, in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.
There is no other way.
And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.
Yep.
He ain't wrong.
Yeah.
It's so obvious.
You can't set up the monopoly board with someone owning all the properties and say, okay, but now the rules are equal.
It's like, okay, well, now I have the opportunity to land on every single property I don't own and lose the game instantly.
Oh, but it's equal rules.
If I also land on something, then it's also bad for me, someone who owns everything.
Like it's just, it's so fucking obvious.
But we're to the point, again, these, these assholes have won.
And it's not temporary either, unless we pack the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court has decided this idiot's view is the view.
This fucking moron's view is what is the law of the land right now.
The law of the land is you can't discriminate on the way to end discrimination on the basis of race is to end discrimination on the basis of race.
And that means continuing the status quo, which is not good and is racist.
And so that's the, that's the history.
That's the law that has won because we fucking let this happen.
Defining Western Values Debate00:15:56
I want to skip down in his essay here for a bit just to do a quick fact check.
And then I think we're going to end focusing on this idea of Western civilization as a study.
It should by now be evident why Harvard and its peer institutions in the Ivy Plus category do not offer fertile ground for a new flowering of courses in the Western tradition.
This was already the case back in 1991 when the Bass Family Foundation offered $20 million to Yale to support the study of Western civilization.
The gift would have supported seven senior professors and four juniors plus graduate assistants and administrative costs.
All they would have had to do is wear these white sheets when they teach.
The university in 1995 chose to return the gift rather than commit the enormity of teaching students about their own civilization.
Come on.
Yeah.
So I was like, I don't think that's true.
Just a quick little fact check here.
So it was a $20 million donation, but there were delays in setting it up and disagreements about faculty appointments because Liam Bass, who was, you know, the alumnus from Yale, said that he would get to pick the professors.
And Yale was like, I don't think so.
So they went back and forth.
Let you do that.
Right.
And this is like per the Los Angeles Times and they're reporting on it.
And they couldn't come to an agreement about it.
And so then they decided to give it back.
Yeah.
And then he redirected it to other charitable causes.
So these institutions have plenty of money.
It also seemed to not really bother him that much.
They continue to support the university.
I mean, they often are donating quite a lot of money to Yale.
So it was just a specific disagreement about this particular curriculum and the faculty that would be there.
And wouldn't you know it, it's not exactly how James Hankins has portrayed it in his essay.
He should study some history.
Okay.
I don't think we've ever talked about Western Civ on this show, have we?
I know that I have prepped it for something before and we didn't get to it, I'm pretty sure, but it's always worth talking about.
Yeah.
And it's such like a big conversation that I don't think we're going to, you know, start and finish it here.
I think we'll probably carry on this conversation in plenty of other episodes.
But this is obviously a big thorn in James Hankins side.
All I hear now is dog whistles when I hear that.
Like I can't even, you know, and maybe my woke ass is too, you know, woke, but like whenever I hear anyone say Western Civ, it's just like, I, I, look, I don't know, I'm not good at this stuff, but I don't know what that means.
Like it doesn't mean the cardinal direction because Western doesn't include a whole bunch of stuff that's in the West.
Correct.
What is it?
You're going to tell me.
Yeah.
Well, I want to set it up with some of his misgivings about the direction that history has gone.
He says, in the hands of hyper-progressive or woke practitioners, Western global history is often indeed actively anti-Western.
Older Western societies are presented as inherently illiberal to be contrasted unfavorably with the perfectly liberal society promised by the prophets of the progressive future.
A popular project among hysterical idiot.
A popular project among global historians is quote decentering the West, where Western countries are literally put in their place as an ugly growth on the backside of Eurasia.
In this absurdist rendering of world history, Central Asian peoples, formerly known as barbarians, are presented as the drivers of cultural innovation, spreading their benign influence east and west via the Silk Road.
God damn.
I need a degree to tell how many ways that's racist.
Like, I don't even know.
You know what I mean?
Like, I need some help.
Like, I don't even know what to say about some of this stuff.
Many now, this is skipping down towards the end of it.
It is now more than half a century since Western Civ courses have been regularly required of high school and college students.
Few students or teachers have retained a sense that they are inheritors of a great legacy handed down via the classical and Christian traditions.
Few Westerners today understand where our civilizational commitments to free debate and rational argument, self-government, citizenship, constitutionalism, the rule of law, the idea of human dignity, and our love of personal freedom.
They don't have human dignity over in those barbarian lands.
Yep.
Yep.
And that's such a common thing, too.
I have a video.
I don't know if we'll get to, but I'll share it in the show notes for sure where trying to define Western civilization and Western values is nonsense.
It's nonsense.
And our love of personal freedoms come from and why people in our past studied and worked and fought to preserve those things.
Thanks to the pall of negativity that has settled on all things Western, fewer and fewer in the younger generation are able to appreciate Western arts and architecture, music, literature, and philosophy.
Many now believe that our civilization is on the point of collapse, but few seem willing to take the steps necessary to preserve it.
Civilizations are not automatically self-replicating.
They need to be studied and cultivated.
Few remember that Western civilizations have apparently been on the point of collapse before and have been reborn before.
To hope for a change in sentiment in our leading universities is by no means absurd.
Even now, there are some liberal academics who accept what used to be a matter of common sense that the young, whatever their ethnic roots, should learn about the civilization that made them, the Western traditions that created the beliefs and institutions among which, sightless, they now live.
For those like myself, however, who have lived through the decline of higher education in elite and quotes universities, that would be a triumph of hope over experience, as Johnson said, of remarriage.
For now, a better hope lies in building new institutions unencumbered by the corruption and self-hatred that infect the old.
And that's how he ends it.
It is so interesting to me that this is not a new debate in history.
The idea that we need to expand beyond the classics, right, and Western civilization, what even is Western civilization, is a pretty spirited debate among history professors and academics.
I found this piece from 1996, where this author, again, this is through historians.org.
And let me give him credit, Thomas W. Davis.
I write this essay with all the zeal of a recent convert to world history who's been academically energized by his newfound devotion to the subject.
I also write with at least some awareness of the problems involved in teaching the subject.
And he says he began his career in 1972.
He specialized in British history.
He loved it.
And then he could have continued with Western Civ until retirement once he got tenure.
But something kept troubling me about the course.
In particular, I wondered occasionally if the rumblings about world history within the profession were worth further consideration.
Increasingly, the answer for me became a resounding yes, not because of political correctness, a desire to attack Western Civ, demands for multiculturalism, or the ethnic diversity in my classrooms, but simply because of what I considered to be more easy, educationally correct.
It came down to a question.
It came down to a question J.H. Hexter once posed, which of the two courses is more beneficial for our students?
For today's students, who will be spending most of their adult lives in the 21st century, I came increasingly to see the advantages of world history.
And then he did a faculty exchange and just, I mean, I think any common sense, and maybe this is really hard for people who are like so deep in their world of what they know and what they've learned and what they, you know, really care about.
It's almost like identity for them.
But it's not part of my identity.
White identity for them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I think this common sense idea is like, why, why would I want to limit my understanding of history based off of something that is like centered on the people with power in a lot of those situations in the same way that like understanding of maps, right?
The map that we've seen is not necessarily the best representation.
It's not necessarily the most accurate because it was drawn to center Western civilization, basically.
And then all of a sudden, Trump wants Greenland because of a map being centered with your projection of it being skewed.
So I think that it's just really interesting that he is decrying all of these things that have long been issues in history departments.
And he has just been so insulated by his power, by the institutional status of Harvard, by his privilege, that he hasn't ever had to engage in it, truthfully.
I mean, I feel like that's the big piece of this essay is he's decrying all of these things that are not new.
He's never had to think about.
Right.
Right.
The diversity issues in history, the gender issues in history, the debate within history itself about what do we want to teach?
How do we want to set up our courses?
And I want to end with just looking at what is Western civilization and what are Western values.
No idea.
We didn't coordinate on this.
I just made that point.
Like, I don't, every time I hear it, I'm like, what does that mean?
Yeah.
What does it mean?
And I think this is kind of a fun video where someone is trying to also define what it means.
I'm Mr. Beat.
I'm here in the Western world where we do Western things and we have Western values.
You know what Western values are, right?
Wait, what?
Oh, is that why you clicked on this video to watch?
Very well then.
Let's try to define what Western values are.
I think I'm going to go grab my old trusty dictionary.
Hey, while I'm doing that, Ellie, can you play that clip I have pulled up on my computer for the audience?
Great.
She's going to play.
Yeah, that one right there.
That's his catalog while I find my dictionary.
To assert the superiority of Western values is to state the obvious.
It's to have faith in ourselves and it's to have faith in other people.
Thank you.
That was from a wonderful debate from 2013 hosted by Intelligence Squared in which they spoke about whether or not the West should be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values.
I'll be showing more clips of it later in this video.
Just hold on to your butts for that.
Now, wait a second.
I got my dictionary here, but before we define what Western values are, we should probably back up and define first what the West is.
West.
The direction toward the point of the horizon where the sun sets at the equinoxes on the left-hand side of a person facing north or the part of the horizon lying in this direction.
Well, that's not terribly helpful at all, is it?
Now, you may be thinking, Mr. Beat, you should already know what the West is.
We all know what the West is, right?
After all, I spent at least hundreds of hours studying for overpriced Western civilization classes I took in college.
And yet, years later, I still found myself Googling what the West actually was.
Is it a reference to the Western hemisphere?
No, not really.
It basically is a reference to Europe or any part of the world that has historically been heavily influenced by Europe.
For that reason, the West is often expanded to the Americas.
So we can skip ahead a little bit.
I should just make the video I want to make that exist.
Yeah.
But if you skip ahead to 4.10, we'll talk about Western values.
Okay.
So now that we've gone over what the West is, now let's attempt to define Western values.
Are they simply the values that people who live in the west have?
No, not really.
More on why that is in a bit, but know that Western values are rooted in Western civilization itself.
Western civilization is the heritage of customs, belief systems, social norms, political systems, economic systems, and technologies of the West.
Basically, the values attached to Western civilization are Western values.
More than anything, Western values have been most influenced by the big three: Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian culture.
But to assume those three influences didn't overlap with other influences outside of the West is silly.
For example, there are quite a bit of similarities.
Why did Adam Scott do the voiceover?
A few seconds.
Most influenced by the big three.
Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian culture.
But to assume those three influences didn't overlap with other influences outside of the West is silly.
For example, there are quite a bit of similarities when it comes to Western and Eastern religions.
And here's another thing: when I researched examples of so-called Western values, I began to realize that these are values that most human beings have, whether they want to be able to do it.
Be nice, don't steal, help people.
Is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that are more than just bloody opinions?
Western values.
That was a Jordan Peterson jumpstart.
We know what they are.
They are liberal democracy.
This isn't Christopher Hitchens.
I just want to explain.
Yeah.
A culture of human rights.
They are, and this is very important, freedom of expression.
They are freedom of worship.
And they are secular government.
Well, the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality.
Western civilization offers liberating doubt, which leads to the methodological principles of scientific skepticism.
The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies.
Western values, individual liberty, privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion.
Western values, including democracy, the rule of law, and equality between citizens, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality.
We entered into treaties to codify Western values of freedom and human rights.
Western failures like we like, at least I like them.
Free trade, human rights, all that kind of stuff.
And what distinguishes the West from all other cultures are the institutions of democracy and science.
Religious tolerance.
Abolition of slavery.
And Shapiro jumps in.
Universal human rights, the development of the scientific method.
By the way, here's a list I compiled of examples of what folks called Western values.
So we can stop there.
It's basically a screen of just a ton of different things, which it's a little or a lot racist to assume that those aren't values that are present in other cultures as well.
Again, West is not a culture either.
But what this really comes down to is like people who so deeply want us to be covering Western civilization, they can't agree on what it is, what it's centered around.
Why "Western Values" Became Controversial00:03:54
And they are.
They can.
It just, they can't say it because it's racist.
Yeah.
I don't think everyone who says Western civilization is outwardly specifically racist, but it is racist.
It means white people.
It is Europe.
I agree.
And so I have this piece that was when Steve King was running for Congress over in Iowa.
And he was quoted in the New York Times asking white nationalists, white supremacists, Western civilization, how did that language become offensive?
How did white nationalists become offensive?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this guy.
Seriously?
And where did the Ku Klux Klan become?
What are you talking about?
White nationalists?
It's inherently offensive.
Yeah, exactly.
I think that what, yeah, white nationalists, white supremacists, what are you talking about?
But Western civilization, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott responded, I'm unsure who was offended by the term Western civilization on its own.
However, this article I was looking at links, it says he would find hyperlink, many, hyperlink, different, hyperlink people, hyperlink, including classical scholars, all those things hyperlinked, arguing that Western civilization is coded language for white supremacy.
Yeah.
Oh, that's because it is.
And here's an example of that.
If you go to American Renaissance, a neo-Nazi magazine that's online, here's an article they wrote.
Western civilization is white civilization.
Okay, there you go.
Figured it out.
That is what it is.
The racists sure think it's racist.
Right.
And so he's talking, the person who wrote this is talking about that same exact situation with Steve King being quoted in the New York Times about white nationalists, white supremacists, Western civilization.
How did that language become offensive?
And from American Renaissance's perspective, they're like, yeah, it's not offensive because, you know, none of that stuff's offensive because white people are, you know, we're awesome, I guess, is what their position is.
So there's so much that we can talk about with Western civilization, but James Hankins accidentally obtuse, purposefully obtuse.
I don't know.
I don't know, but he's never really had to grapple with this stuff.
I'm sure he would push back on all of this.
This old sexist piece of shit.
Yeah.
That Western civilization is something that is inherently racist.
But that's not to say you can't.
It's not that like we shouldn't study history of ancient Greece.
We shouldn't study history of ancient Rome.
Like, yeah, we should.
We should study.
I would love to study the history of everything, literally everything in the world from all countries.
But I think what's valuable is then also recognizing the perspective of the history that you're learning from and that it might be flawed.
It might be biased to whatever culture, whatever country, whatever ethnic group or anything like that is presenting.
White people get to always be the default.
Yeah.
And so from my perspective, I think that these are good reckonings for higher institutions to have.
I'm sure James Hankins will be very happy in Florida.
He donated to DeSantis' campaign when he ran for president.
He's been, you know, 100% on board with that guy.
I don't know where he stands with Trump exactly.
Later in the Prague or U video, he said, you know, like Trump calling this stuff out is hurting more than it's helping because it's making people have their guard up more because it's coming from Trump when it's, you know, going after institutions like Harvard and Columbia and stuff.
Anyway, I just thought it'd be fun to kind of go down this guy's position, this history professor, and how, you know, poor, poor Western civ scholars are being cast in the rubbish bin.
Indication of Endlessness00:01:13
And he's fleeing to Florida in order to avoid it.
So what did you learn?
In the end, yet another whiny, crybaby, racist old white man is full of shit.
Is that what we learned?
That's the name of the show.
So that's what we came here to learn every time.
And I love too how much you brought up from, you know, 1990 fucking one, where they always try to sell themselves as like, well, this is, it's, it's worse.
It's worse than it's ever been.
I used to be, and he didn't really do this directly, but they always try to give you the indication that like this is a new thing that crazy kids are doing.
And it's just, it's so bad now I can't even, it's like, dude, you've been the same conservative piece of shit since before I have memories, you know, like it's, it's not new.
You've always been a piece of shit.
You're one of the dinosaurs holding women and people of color out of your fucking field and you should go retire and die soon.
Yeah, hopefully.
That's what I think.
And he's, you know, moving to Florida where most folks go to retire and die soon.