In his article in the Oct. 30 edition of the Ottawa Citizen entitled, “Racism, sexism and classism, oh my,” Bruce Bawer attempts to seriously indict the humanities, citing a widespread presence of ideologically-driven pedagogy. The piece points to Guillermo Martínez de Velasco’s recent piece in the McGill Daily, “You are racist,” as an example of what is wrong with  liberal arts education today. Bawer argues that today, college education is ultimately meant to indoctrinate young people with hatred for the West and with divisive ideas about class and human relations.

Bawer’s argument is a broad one—he claims that disciplines that emerged in the 1960s, especially those with ‘studies’ in their names, have strayed from their “legitimate scholarly interests.” He asserts that today, they are driven only by Marxist doctrine. We in the humanities do not, according to Bawer, stand up efficiently for ideals of academic and Western heritage. Instead, we are ‘brainwashed’ into relying on obscure jargon and cultural relativity, and have abandoned critical thinking altogether. Bawer offers his solution: namely, a return to the teaching of what he calls “objective facts about history,” as represented by “great literature and great philosophers.”

A simple question may be asked of Bawer: how do we in academia determine what constitutes an “objective fact about history”?  A student of history should be able to recognize that what we regard as objective fact is fluid and can change; monolithic stories are difficult to construct from the differing accounts of reliable sources. The process of learning how to interpret sources is often a process of questioning what we previously thought were concrete facts in our historical narratives. How do we determine what is really true? Should previous centuries’ written histories be taken as objective fact on the basis of their age alone?

The ‘studies’ Bawer derides represent new areas of inquiry, and attempt to open space within and to complicate what we now see as the oversimplified facts of the past. In my own field—Religious Studies, or more precisely, the 1960s’ creation Buddhist Studies—hundreds of years of Western academic writing has undergone extensive critique centred on the problems of Orientalism. This type of criticism may tire and frustrate writers like Bawer, who are sick of the deconstruction of Western sources, but the ostensible solution of returning to an idealized past when they did not exist is hardly tenable.

The post-1960s era in the humanities represents an attempt to confront deeply difficult questions about how we generate objective facts. We are not scientists, and the humanities have few, if any, methodologies that can rival the power of the scientific approach. Graduates and professors are regarded as ‘experts’ in their fields, able to explain what are the facts and what are not. Yet, we end up with inconclusive answers despite these many great thinkers. Scholastic self-criticism does not equate to the degradation of the Western academy—the very opposite is true. Such criticisms represent tremendous progress in the humanities, and signal our insistence on adapting to a world where ‘objective facts’ remain more complicated than they appear.

It is indeed the case that academia today faces problems. Perhaps education is becoming too commodified, too factory-like, too simplistic; perhaps classes at an institution like McGill often grow so large, or cover so much ground, that students cannot truly engage anymore. ‘Indoctrination’ is always a risk if people are unable to, or are discouraged from, engaging critically with their source material.

All is open to criticism—and this is certainly true of approaches used in the ‘studies.’ But if Bawer has such criticisms to make of academia, then his arguments must be made convincingly with attention to detail, rather than with mocking condescension and generalizations. Bawer’s broad strokes are a facile way of dismissing methodologies that, perhaps frustratingly, continue to poke so many holes in the ‘objective facts’ of the past. Solutions are to be found only in careful thought, and in the most active critical engagement with today’s and yesterday’s sources, and not in simplistic calls to a romanticized past.