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.

The same period brought a broader loosening of academic standards. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia all implemented test-optional policies starting in 2020, a change that National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood noted primarily benefited applicants whose scores were too low to be competitive. Soon after remedial math was added to Harvard’s course catalog and grade inflation, as has been recently noted, became rampant across campus.

Public trust in higher education eroded accordingly. A 2025 Manhattan Institute poll found that 46 percent of registered voters had little or no confidence in the Ivy League, with 64 percent supporting a return to merit-based admissions and rigorous academic standards. The institutions that had long traded on their reputation for excellence had, over more than a decade, spent much of it down.

This brief look back may seem unnecessary, but keeping in mind the scale of what America’s elite universities became—and how long they were permitted to slide downward—is precisely what justifies the scrutiny they now face, from the Trump administration and outlets like this one alike. The current push for accountability in higher education did not emerge from nowhere.

Do not let reform be abandoned simply because we have forgotten why it was needed.