Reports of Western Civilization’s Death at Harvard Are Greatly Exaggerated

Does Harvard teach its undergraduates about “Western civilization”? As a history major there, I was recently surprised to learn—at least according to the conservative media ecosystem—that the answer is “no.”

In the December 29 New York Post, Daniel McCarthy, the conservative columnist, declared that “at Harvard University today, professors who teach Western history are history.” David Wolpe, a former visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, posted that “Harvard has no one left who teaches Western Civilization.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for his part, posted that “the study of western civilization” has “completely cratered” at institutions like Harvard.

That’s news to me. Just last month, I was torn between enrolling in What is Global European History? or Political Debates in the Empire of New Rome. And this past fall, the department’s offerings included The Fall of the Roman Empire, Germany, 1848–1949, Early Modern Europe, Travelers in the Byzantine World, and Amsterdam: Portrait of an Early Modern Metropolis.

What’s going on here? Where could these eminent voices have gotten the idea that Harvard has abandoned the study of Western history?

The proximate cause is a recent Compact essay by James Hankins, a soon-to-be-former Harvard history professor decamping for the University of Florida’s new conservative Hamilton School. In it, Hankins laments that Harvard has allowed the study of “Western fields” to “wither on the vine”—a process that has turned us undergraduates “uncivilized.” Conservative media, for its part, appears to have taken Hankins’s metaphor too literally.

Hankins, to his credit, sought to correct the record on X. “I keep reading people who say that no one is teaching Western civilization any more at Harvard,” he posted on December 31. He continued, “Harvard (where I’m still on the faculty till June 30) has 17 outstanding people teaching in Western fields, ancient, medieval, and modern.” 

But have Western fields “withered” at Harvard, as Hankins writes? In a word, no.

In his Compact essay, Hankins claimed that Harvard’s history department has “not hired with tenure a historian in a Western field—ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern—in a decade.” This is false. Harvard hired Derek Penslar, a scholar of European and Middle Eastern Jewish history, in 2016. It did so with tenure. He is, by any reasonable measure, a historian within a “Western field.”

Hankins has previously claimed something very similar, that “the Harvard History Dept last hired or promoted a senior historian in a Western field (ancient, medieval, modern Europe) in 2007.” This is simply not true. By my count, Harvard has hired or promoted at least five senior historians in those areas since, in addition to Penslar—Allison Frank Johnson, Maya Jasanoff, Dimiter Angelov, Mary Lewis, and Tamar Herzog.

And why limit the scope of “Western fields” to Harvard’s history department, as Hankins does? The study of ancient Greece and Rome properly belongs to the Classics department, which houses scholars of ancient Greek prose literature, Greek historiography, Latin historiography, Roman Republican and early Imperial history, Mediterranean archaeology, and Byzantine literature. Harvard hired Emily Greenwood, a scholar of Greek and Roman classical traditions and their historiography, with tenure, in 2022. Rachel Love, a scholar of Latin historiography and the literary culture of the Roman republic, became associate professor—a promotion indicating the department’s belief that a professor has indicated “sufficient promise and achievement” to gain tenure—this year. 

Reports of Western civilization’s death at Harvard, in other words, have been greatly exaggerated. The university remains home to scholars of the West, and the idea that it’s stopped hiring in these fields is pure invention. I suspect that what these critics mean to say is that there are no conservatives among Harvard’s scholars of Western history. The unspoken premise here, it seems, is that critical scholars in Western fields aren’t really engaged in the study of “Western civilization.” 

Again, to his credit, Hankins is at least intermittently honest on this front, acknowledging that scholars who view the historical lens of “Western civilization” as outdated—or even as racially charged—can still, in his view, be legitimate historians of Western societies. Yet elsewhere, he omits these very scholars from his tally of Harvard historians of ancient, medieval, or modern Europe. Whether critical scholars “count” to Hankins, it seems, depends upon his mood.

When DeSantis, Wolpe, and McCarthy declare that Harvard has abandoned the study of “Western Civilization,” they are repackaging an old grievance in new language. What they lament isn’t the disappearance of Western history—which is very much alive at Harvard—but the scarcity of conservatives in academic life.

Indeed, Hankins is the last bona fide conservative in Harvard’s history department, and among the last within the university’s humanities departments at large. When DeSantis or McCarthy declares that Harvard has abandoned Western civilization, they are registering not the absence of courses on Rome or early modern Europe, but the marginalization of certain intellectual and political commitments within the academy. That concern may be worth debating. But it should be discussed honestly.

The fixation on “wokeness,” however, obscures a much larger and more consequential transformation reshaping the humanities at Harvard and elsewhere. The most serious pressure on Western history—and on the humanities more broadly—comes not from ideological capture, but from the economic priorities of academic institutions.

Over the past decade, student demand for the humanities has cratered. Nationally, the share of undergraduates majoring in humanities disciplines has fallen by roughly 25 percent between 2012 and 2020. The number of English majors declined by about one-third between 2013 and 2023. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, humanities degrees fell from 16.8 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 2010-11 to 12.8 percent in 2020-21—a sharp contraction both in absolute terms and as a share of overall enrollment.

Harvard has not been immune. As of 2022, just seven percent of Harvard freshmen intended to concentrate in the humanities, down from 20 percent in 2012. (Because Harvard must be different, it calls majors “concentrations.”) That figure stood at 30 percent in the 1970s. Harvard’s history department has felt these pressures especially acutely: its number of concentrators plunged by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020.

These shifts matter because they drive resource allocation. Departments with shrinking undergraduate enrollments lose leverage. Lines go unfilled. Retirements are not replaced. In that environment, every hire becomes existential, and fields often perceived as politically unsavory (the study of Western history, particularly by conservatives, among them) are especially vulnerable.

It is within this context that decisions about Western history are being made. Harvard has indeed invested more heavily in global and comparative approaches. It has been slower to replace retiring European specialists than it was a generation ago. But these choices exist within a context of dwindling resources for disciplines that don’t promise high enrollments, external funding, and pipelines to well-paid careers. 

All of this makes the panic over power dynamics within Harvard’s history department feel misdirected. It may well be that Harvard’s history department has excluded conservatives from teaching positions to its detriment. But these internal dynamics are not the greatest threat to the study of Western history, considering the waning of institutional confidence that the humanities, Western or otherwise, sit near the core of the modern university’s mission.

That is a problem worth taking seriously. It cannot be addressed by pretending that Harvard has stopped teaching Rome, or Europe, or the Renaissance. If the humanities are in trouble—and they are—it is not because too many scholars promote Foucault. It is because fewer students are reading anything at all that does not promise a return on investment. If critics want to defend Western civilization, they might begin by confronting that reality, rather than inventing one.