If there is one thing that drives me nuts about defenders of the humanities, it’s their insistence on nailing their argument to an appeal to “historic values” which simply don’t exist.

Take a recent essay pro-Liberal Arts essay in the National Post by Simon Fraser University professor Patrick Keeney, who writes, for instance, that liberal education is an “ideal that goes back to the Greeks.” That simply isn’t correct. Liberal education is a medieval invention – and it wasn’t all that liberal in a modern sense either, consisting then of astronomy, music, geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, logic and grammar. Socrates, if you’ll recall your philosophy 101, kept getting his butt kicked in the marketplace by the sophists, who taught skills that were actually lucrative. Plato may not have liked the sophists – they were of course among the many Athenians who opposed his proto-fascist plans for the place – and painted them in a negative light for all eternity but there’s no question whose services Greeks actually preferred.

Then there’s the predictable yarn about how the historic mission of universities is being “bulldozed in the name of… economic pragmatism” as universities turn into mere “vocational schools.” Leaving aside the scorn for vocational education, this commonly held assumption is similarly at odds with the historical record. The earliest university faculties were entirely professional – law at Bologna, medicine at Salerno, religion at Paris, and so on. Universities founded on liberal education principles were relatively rare until nineteenth century America – a time and place in which universities were arguably at their most elitist.

And then there’s the gall of arguing that governments that are to blame for convincing people that universities ought to have a professional focus. Universities have succeeded at attracting public funds by arguing that they can best create job-ready graduates. That’s always been the trade-off for public funding. There was never an era when governments sough to invest billions so every third teenager in our society can take four years to develop a life of the mind.

As the focus and function of the university continues to evolve, it’s essential that the public discourse about the role of higher education ground itself in accuracy. It shouldn’t be too much to ask defenders of disciplines in the humanities (which includes the discipline of history) who seek – in their professional lives – to uncover truth to actually get their facts right.

To put it another way, if there has been, as Keeney argues, “a widespread drift away from the arts and humanities and toward professional, applied and vocational study,” it is nothing more than a return to the university’s roots.