After 40 years on the faculty, James Hankins left Harvard in December 2025. His essay in Compact, “Why I’m Leaving Harvard,” offered a firsthand account of what the preceding decade had actually looked like from inside one of America’s most celebrated institutions. Among his many indictments was the systematic displacement of academic merit by racial preference in admissions.
Reviewing graduate applications in fall 2020, Hankins encountered a candidate who would, in any prior year, have risen immediately to the top of the pool — only to be told by an admissions committee member that taking a white male “was not happening this year.”
Such blatant discrimination would have been hard to believe if the facts didn’t bear out Hankins’s testimony. But they do. The Economist found, for instance, that, setting aside recruited athletes and legacy students, black applicants had nearly double the chance of admission to Harvard between 2014 and 2019 as Asian students, even when the latter had higher test scores and stronger overall academic metrics. When the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, the admissions data that followed revealed just how far the scales had been tipped. At MIT, black admissions fell from 13 percent to five percent while Asian admissions rose from 41 percent to 47 percent.
Moreover, these institutions had been practicing racial preference even as it failed on its own terms. A 2015 Heritage Foundation report found that beneficiaries of race-preferential admissions were, on average, less successful than similarly credentialed students who attended schools where their credentials placed them in the middle or top of the class, contributing to higher failure and dropout rates that a color-blind process would have avoided.
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