(NewsNation) — A Harvard University professor who taught history at the prestigious Ivy League institution announced his retirement in a scathing essay that criticizes several cultural aspects of the school, including what he says is the exclusion of white males.
James Hankins crafted the essay, entitled, “Why I Am Leaving Harvard, in which he states that his decision to leave the university “was not a sudden one.” Hankins wrote that his retirement comes four years after the school invoked a “strict COVID regime” that required professors to wear masks while teaching and to conduct classes over Zoom.
“Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education,” Hankins wrote, calling the school’s stance on the deadly virus “tyrannous invasions of private life.”
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Hankins wrote that his four decades of teaching at Harvard have provided him with a unique vantage point but that he decided in 2020 that he no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. Hankins cited the school’s stance on the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
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The latter drastically changed Harvard’s admissions standards and had “serious consequences for the ways we handled our affairs,” the letter states. Hankins said that in reviewing graduate student applications, he reviewed a candidate who, in the past, would have been a “perfect fit” for the university…