Professor James Hankins wrote in a piece titled "Whit I'm Leaving Harvard" that his decision to retire "was not a sudden one," and that he'd made up his mind in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and George Floyd riots – both of which dramatically changed Harvard's graduate admissions process.

"In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool," he wrote. "In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that 'that' (meaning admitting a white male) was 'not happening this year," 

Hankins said that in another instance, a white male student who he described as "literally the best" at Harvard – and who won the prize for graduating senior with the best overall academic record – was also rejected from the school's graduate program because "He too was a white male."

"I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected," Hankins continued. "Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours."

"The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female."

Hankins gave his last lecture at the school two weeks ago, after finishing out a four-year retirement contract he signed in 2021 which has now expired. 

Hankins called Harvard's COVID restrictions "tyrannous invasions of private life" – as professors were forced to lecture in masks and give seminars on Zoom. 

On top of that – he decried Harvard's dropping their "two-book standard" of requiring staff to have published two books to prove their expertise in a subject area, blaming "feminist activists" 

"The two-book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty," he wrote, adding "Feminist activists, at Harvard as elsewhere, were demanding that half of all new appointments be women. That, they claimed, was what liberal standards of equality required."

Hankins wrote that women previously made up less than 10% of PhDs in the history department – however "equality required that standards be lowered."