The Universities’ War Against Civilisation: Professor James Hankins, By James Reed
James Hankins's resignation from Harvard — and his public critique of how Western universities have embraced a radical woke agenda — should have been an international wake-up call. Instead, it was treated as just another professor quitting his job. But what Hankins describes isn't a fringe irritation; it's a full-blown cultural offensive that has hollowed out the very mission of higher education. And make no mistake: the situation is worse than even he acknowledges.
Hankins's central claim is that elite universities have been co-opted by a form of ideological zealotry that betrays Western heritage and scholarly integrity. He points to revisionist curricula, censorious campus cultures, and administrative complicity with radical identity politics. Yet in his critique there remains an assumption — implicit, perhaps unintentional — that academia is still, at its core, a place of debate, inquiry, and truth-seeking. That assumption is no longer true.
What we are witnessing is not merely the infiltration of "woke" ideas into universities. It is the institutionalisation of a new orthodoxy that is hostile to dissent, contemptuous of tradition, and determined to remake not just educational content but the very character of students who pass through these institutions. This is not a battle of ideas; it is a war on intellectual rationality itself.
Consider the historical basic functions of a university: to teach, to research, to challenge students to think critically, to preserve and interpret the intellectual inheritance of the West. All of these functions have been compromised. Courses that used to explore the canon now frame the canon as inherently oppressive. Research agendas are shaped less by curiosity than by compliance with ideological mandates. And students who question prevailing orthodoxies are not encouraged to think; they are vilified, ostracised, or worse.
Hankins laments the distortion of history and literature. But what he may not sufficiently emphasise is the systemic purge of epistemic legitimacy — the notion that some ideas are true and some are false, that some arguments are better supported by evidence than others. In today's academy, truth has become relative, context-dependent, and subordinate to political exigency. Facts are negotiable if they conflict with preferred narratives. Evidence is suspect if it contradicts prevailing dogmas.
This is not merely an academic problem; it is a civilisational crisis. Universities do not exist in isolation. They train the lawyers, journalists, educators, policymakers, and cultural arbiters of tomorrow. When these institutions abandon standards of truth and replace them with ideological conformity, they export those errors into every corner of public life.
The consequences are already visible. Public discourse is coarsened. Policy debates are impoverished. Institutions that once demanded rigour now settle for virtue signalling. And a generation of young people is being socialised not to think critically, but to parrot ideological scripts.
Worse still, the rot goes beyond the humanities and social sciences. Even STEM fields are not immune. Research funding, hiring decisions, and laboratory priorities are increasingly influenced by considerations unrelated to scientific merit. When ideology dictates what questions are worth asking, the very progress of knowledge is imperilled.
Hankins's stand is courageous. But the broader public must grasp that this isn't an isolated grievance from one disgruntled scholar. It is a symptom of a deeper structural collapse: the capture of higher education by an ideology that disdains the West's intellectual heritage, rejects objective standards of inquiry, and seeks to reshape the cultural landscape in its image.
The antidote is not simply more debates or programs entitled "diversity of thought." It requires a recommitment to intellectual humility, to the pursuit of truth even when it offends, to the preservation of a shared heritage because it contains hard-won wisdom, and to the protection of dissent as an essential pillar of education. It also requires external pressure — from alumni, parents, donors, and policymakers — to restore accountability to institutions that have lost their way.
If Western universities have become ideological fortresses rather than marketplaces of ideas, then the challenge before us is not merely to criticise individual policies or professors, but to reclaim the very purpose of higher education. Anything less is surrender.
In the end, James Hankins is right to raise the alarm. But we should recognise that the battle is not half-won and that the stakes are far greater than a single resignation. What is at risk is not just the integrity of our universities, but the intellectual future of our civilisation.
