Two weeks ago, I delivered my final lecture at Harvard, concluding a forty-year tenure as a professor of history. Four decades at one of the world’s preeminent universities provides a singular vantage point from which to witness a profound transformation: the systematic replacement of Western history with "global history." This shift is not merely a curricular tweak; it is a primary reason why the younger generation now finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation. As T.S. Eliot once observed, “A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments.” Today, that pattern is being intentionally unraveled.
My decision to retire was a deliberate departure. I am finishing a four-year retirement contract signed in the fall of 2021—the year I realized I no longer wished to teach at Harvard. We had just endured two years of a strict Covid regime, a form of emergency governance that mirrored the nation’s uncritical genuflection to "The Science." It was a period marked by a reflexive proclivity for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, we were commanded to lecture through masks and conduct seminars over Zoom. Neither practice is compatible with a liberal education, which requires the unmediated encounter of mind and spirit.
The year prior, the university had "taken a knee" during the "Summer of Floyd." What I initially mistook for empty virtue-signaling turned out to be a structural revolution. While reviewing graduate applications in late 2020, I found a candidate who was, by any historical standard, a perfect fit. In previous decades, he would have been a "shoo-in." In 2021, however, a member of the admissions committee informed me bluntly that admitting a white male was “not happening this year.”
This was not an isolated incident. That same year, a certifiably brilliant undergraduate—the top student in his class and winner of the prize for the best overall academic record—was rejected from every graduate program he applied to. He, too, was a white male. When I called colleagues at other elite institutions to ask how such a talent could be passed over, the answer was always the same: an unspoken protocol of exclusion had taken hold. It brought to mind C.S. Lewis’s warning in The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Harvard may currently be seeking a "safe pair of hands" under President Alan Garber following the Claudine Gay debacle—a fiasco that exposed a shocking indifference to anti-Semitism—but the rot in the humanities remains deep. I have chosen to move my work to the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. While Harvard’s history department has essentially abandoned the Western tradition, Hamilton is committed to it. When pedagogy replaces "Western Civilization" with a nebulous "global history," the socialization of young Americans is fractured. As the saying goes, “When you don't teach the young what civilization is, they become uncivilized.”
The data of decline is irrefutable. In the last decade, Harvard’s history department has not made a single tenured hire in a Western field—ancient, medieval, or modern. The last internal promotion to tenure in these fields occurred in 2012. While we have lost eight giants of Western history to death or retirement, the department has outsourced Ancient History to the Classics department and allowed other core fields to die on the vine.
Critics will claim that the "death of Western history" is hyperbole, pointing to a catalog "pullulating" with courses. But these courses are often peripheral or politicized. The foundational pillars—the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment—are being traded for a surplus of historians focused on race, gender, and colonialism. We are witnessing what Edmund Burke called a revolution in which “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.”
When I ask why we must privilege Western history, I am met with charges of "narrowness." But to understand the world, one must first understand one’s home. Can I really believe it is more important for an American student to learn about the West than about sub-Saharan Africa? To borrow from Winston Churchill: “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” Without the specific context of the West’s failures and triumphs, a student has no compass to navigate the "global" world they are supposedly being prepared for.
The Harvard I joined in 1985 was a different world. It was a place of "disciplinary conservatives"—scholars like Bernard Bailyn and Richard Pipes—who believed that professional standards should never be sacrificed to academic fashion. We used to mock the word "problematic" as a "Princeton term." There was an understanding that our research priorities were not dictated by the whims of eighteen-year-olds. As my mentor Ned Keenan once famously told a faculty meeting: “This faculty does not choose to have its research priorities dictated by the intellectual interests of undergraduates.” That statement, which today would be viewed as heresy, was then met with rapturous applause. It was an assertion of the high calling of history.
In those days, a senior appointment at Harvard required a "field-defining book." As my late colleague Mark Kishlansky used to say: “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?’”
Today, the "Who?" has become the norm, as identity and "intersectional scores" replace the two-book standard. By contrast, the Hamilton School has, in just four years, hired forty-eight outstanding scholars—many of them the "dreaded" white males or women working on "disfavored" traditional subjects. They represent the refugees of a system that has traded excellence for equity. I am joining them because I believe that the study of the West is not a funeral rite, but a necessity for a free people. If Harvard no longer wishes to be the guardian of that flame, we will light it elsewhere.
