In his Jan. 17 op-ed, “Trump’s kinship with his critics,” George F. Will connected former president Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard for the truth with trends in academia that deny the very existence of objectivity and treat all claims to truth with suspicion.

He has a point, but he’s about 25 years late. There was a trend in the 1990s that more or less answered to what Mr. Will groups under “postmodernism.” It didn’t get much purchase within the discipline of philosophy, but in other humanities, it became something of an orthodoxy. It was called out at the time, most notably by the mathematician and physicist Alan Sokal, who sent a deliberately nonsensical paper to the journal Social Text, which specialized in this kind of thing; the journal accepted it for publication, and he revealed what he’d done.

There aren’t many adherents of this point of view today. I’m a philosophy professor, and I regularly work with faculty in other disciplines in the humanities. They are all engaged in serious research on historical, literary and other topics, where correct answers matter, and good evidence and clear arguments for those answers are expected — and they communicate those goals to their students.

We can never step out of our skins as human beings, and ideologically driven positions do often masquerade as simple truth. So, there’s room for deeper reflection about what objectivity and freedom from bias really amount to. But that’s very far from suggesting that any one interpretation of things is as good as any other, and I don’t know anyone who thinks that.

Richard Bett, Baltimore