Education reformers have been struggling for decades to bury the history of Western Civilization and their efforts have borne more fruit in recent years. Now, the most elite of elite American universities, Harvard, has banished Western history courses altogether in favor of a fantasy narrative that includes crediting barbarian invaders with culturizing the Western world via the Silk Road.

Western Civilization, or Western Civ as it is more commonly known, documents the history of civilization beginning with the ancient Greeks and Romans and continuing through our present age. It encompasses all areas of human development, including culture, politics, invention, and innovation.

Last December, the final death knell for Western Civ at Harvard was sounded when Professor James Hankins ended his 40-year career there as a specialist on the subject of the Renaissance and Western history in general. In a first-person article in Compact, an online magazine founded in 2022, Hankins wrote:

• 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.

He further warned about the unfairness of DEI policies, explaining that one of the catalysts for his exit from Harvard was the university’s discrimination against white males. He described how an excellent student was denied admission in the fall of 2020 because admitting a white male “was not happening.” He wrote of another student:

• [In 2021] 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.

A Newsweek article about Hankins’ departure observed that, “while advocates have pushed universities to work to increase diversity, critics have argued that the policies are unfair to others.” The article noted that such tactics have incurred the ire of President Trump and that his administration has targeted DEI programs in colleges and universities.

Writing in the National Association of Scholars’ (NAS) online newsletter, CounterCurrent, columnist Kali Jerrard observed that Hankins “is the ninth history professor to have left the university, either through retirement, death, or departure for other universities, exposing an alarming fact: Harvard has not promoted nor hired a historian in a Western field since 2012.” She further wrote that Hankins denied leaving Harvard for political reasons, but that he remains “very deeply committed to the revitalization of Western history, the study of Western civilization, which is not something I can do at Harvard.”

Rather than abandon his storied career altogether, Hankins has moved to the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, where Western Civ appears to have a more nurturing home. He’s also the author of a newly published book, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. Vol. 1, that teaches what he says he can no longer teach at Harvard. Hankins’ new book may over time spread its important knowledge far and wide.

Replacing Western history

A 2011 article by NAS’s Peter Wood titled The Vanishing West, sounded the alarm about the loss of Western Civilization courses in American universities starting as far back as 1964. He wrote that by 2010, Western Civ “had disappeared entirely as a requirement at these institutions and was available in some less emphasized form at less than a third of them.”

When NAS delved into the issue, it found that “world history” had taken the place of Western Civ. It further found that American history has also become a rarity even as the proliferation of world history continues to rise. President Trump lamented this loss during his first term, and was a staunch supporter of the 1776 Project that was started in 2018 to restore factual history and civics.

Wood’s article noted: “Clearly, many of those who will eventually assume positions of opinion leadership in our society as teachers in our schools, or as participants in public life, are no longer learning about their civilization’s great story, its triumphs, its vicissitudes, and its singular role in transforming the human condition.” He then posed the rhetorical question: “What is the future of a civilization whose heirs have largely become blinded to its history?”

In tandem with world history is “multiculturalism,” which has been taught for decades in American schools from K-12 through the university level. Describing multiculturalism as “inadequate,” Wood pointed out that it “leaves students ill-equipped to understand the context of their own lives or the world around them. Western Civilization is so interconnected with and influential in the rest of the world that students who are left with scant knowledge of it can achieve at best only a superficial understanding of the larger picture.”

Phyllis Schlafly often warned against the teaching of multiculturalism. In 1991, for example, Phyllis wrote that multiculturalism and cultural diversity “can better be described as divisive, destructive, and false.... It should not be the mission of the public schools to promote ethnic separatism and thereby heighten racial tensions....”

In the same column, Phyllis quoted historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as stating that the “underlying philosophy” [of multiculturalism] is that “ethnicity is the defining experience for most Americans, and that a main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration, and perpetuation of ethnic origins and identities.”

Anyone with even modest powers of observation couldn’t help but recognize how prescient Phyllis was on this topic as she was on so many others. Schoolchildren today are being pitted against each other in countless ways; perhaps in the name of multiculturalism, but more commonly under the guise of DEI, social justice, global education, and other monikers.

Western Civ not dead

The departure of Professor Hankins isn’t just a loss for Harvard, it symbolizes a shift in the focus of history that decenters the west and minimizes its profound influence in the world. Daniel McCarthy’s article on Creators.com quoted Professor Hankins as saying it has come to a point “where Western countries are literally put in their place as an ugly growth on the back side of Eurasia.... Mongol hordes aren’t the only protagonists of the new history, anyone who isn’t white qualifies.”

But while Western Civ may be seriously wounded, it is not dead. There are educational institutions at the university level, such as Hankins’ new home at the University of Florida, and the 182-year-old stalwart in the promotion of Western Civ and American history, Hillsdale College, which not only offers quality graduate and undergraduate degree programs, but also provides online courses and an impressive nationwide K-12 classical curriculum.

A number of other colleges incorporate Western Civ in online degree programs, such as the University of West Alabama, Keiser University, and DeVry University. Many Christian colleges also offer solid instruction in Western Civ, including Thomas Aquinas College and Grand Canyon University (GCU) Christian.

Additionally, there are organizations working to ensure that Western Civ continues to be taught. For example, National Endowments for the Humanities (NEH) is offering long-term endowments that are intended “to build the applicant organization’s capacity in research and teaching of Western civilization, American history and government, and civics.”

Another example is the NAS, a tireless promoter of Western Civ that offers a variety of books, articles, and other resources to aid in the dissemination of such knowledge. NAS’s Institute for the Study of Western Civilization has a physical campus in Cupertino, CA which offers a full slate of Western history classes with required texts, lectures, and languages. The institute also provides outreach efforts to secondary schools in the area.

Harvard in hot water

As for Harvard and the woke Ivy League, President Trump has been at odds with the university for many months, with billions of dollars in federal funding frozen early on by his administration and then partially restored following a judicial order. Trump’s issue with Harvard is similar to that of Professor Hankins, who contrasted the discrimination against exemplary white students with the treatment of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who is black, and whose scholarship was found to be guilty of plagiarism. Yet she remains in good standing, employed by the university to the tune of nearly $1 million per year.

The Trump Administration’s clash with Harvard has resulted in more legal action and a fresh demand just this month that the university pay a $1 billion settlement. At a press briefing on February 5, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president is frustrated with Harvard because the university has “dragged its feet” during months of negotiations.

Leavitt told a reporter from The Daily Signal: “They need to rectify the wrongs and the illegal behavior that took place on their campus over the course of the past several years under the previous administration. The president wants a justified deal to correct for the criminal behavior that took place on their campus.”

The alleged criminal behavior primarily refers to Harvard’s failure to enforce civil rights law by ignoring the harassment of Jewish and Israeli students on campus, among other civil rights violations.

The mainstream media has dogged the president over his battle with Harvard, calling it a “political barrage” of the university. The online news service masslive.com made the laughable argument that Trump’s efforts to restore some semblance of fairness to higher education after decades of leftwing dominance is merely a matter of “conservatives increasingly trying to influence academics and culture at colleges and universities.”

Masslive piled on with another thoroughly discredited assertion—that Trump’s push “is part of a master plan well-documented in Project 2025, a political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023 that has largely served as a blueprint for Trump’s second presidency.” This patently false statement flies in the face of the fact that the president has never embraced Project 2025 or endorsed it in any way. The truth is more likely that liberals know this, but they fear the project because it contains a wealth of common-sense ideas that many conservatives support.

Where it’s headed

Currently, several aspects of the Trump Administration/Harvard clash remain in litigation. In December, the administration appealed a court ruling that restored to the university nearly $3 billion in research funding. It’s possible that a negotiated settlement could ultimately result, but it’s also possible the case could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

A Hechinger Report overview of the Trump Administration’s impact on education during 2025 stated:

• The administration was especially forceful in the higher education arena. It used measures including antidiscrimination law to quickly freeze billions of dollars in higher education research funding, interrupting years-long medical studies and coercing Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, and other institutions into handing over multimillion-dollar payments and agreeing to policy changes demanded by the administration.

But while some Trump Administration prompted changes have been forthcoming, such as curbing DEI, many universities have continued their woke policies despite federal directives and under threat of loss of federal funding. Some schools simply change the policy names or move the responsibility to another department.

In January, The College Fix reported that Columbia University “became the latest higher education institution to fail to live up to its promise of ‘institutional neutrality.’” Columbia’s School of Journalism unnecessarily charged that the FBI raid on the home of a reporter occurred because the reporter was critical of President Trump. However, the reporter herself was not under investigation; the raid was related to a separate inquiry associated with “the leaking of national security documents, according to the Associated Press.”

Columbia also felt compelled to attack the defunding of National Public Radio, but as The College Fix pointed out, “the idea of institutional neutrality holds that entire departments and schools should not be weighing in on every political issue. Whether taxpayers subsidize National Public Radio does not affect the operations of Columbia University at all, nor do individual lawsuits brought by the president against news outlets.”

But the future of higher education and President Trump’s efforts to reform it, including the restoration of Western Civ and American History and civics courses, may not matter if students continue to enter college woefully unprepared.

As a January 20 article by Wight Martindale Jr. of Minding The Campus pointed out: “Any sensible humanities program must explore the past. But the problem is that today’s students can no longer read long texts. Yet the past was a written culture; documents and stories were written out. Over a very short period of time—25 years—traditional literacy has become rare.”

Unless and until genuine critical literacy education can be restored to K-12 classrooms, enabling children to think for themselves rather than being told what to think (see Education Reporter, January 2025), efforts to restore Western Civ and American History and civics to higher education may prove an exercise in futility.

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