For many years, Michael Bérubé has been an outspoken and topical voice in the humanities professoriate. His books cover critical theory, academic employment, and the canon, and he weighs in on current events, academic and political, on a personal blog that has a steady and interactive readership. He’s an MLA insider but also a popular writer, contributing to The Nation, The Village Voice, and Dissent. He leapt into the Culture Wars in the early 1990s, and, with regular sallies into campus controversies, his career sets a different example of professorial labor. His writings don’t evince months and years spent poring over archives and assembling primary documents, and the focus on contemporary matters gives them a dated feel a few years after their publication. But, then, Bérubé’s practice exempts him from many of the vices that have bedeviled humanities professors for three decades.

For one thing, he writes well. Bérubé disdains the mushy, cutesy abstractions of critical theory as much as do traditionalists, and his paragraphs move with clarity and dispatch. His interest in public affairs contrasts well with the haughtiness of his colleagues, whose snide stance toward the man in the street corresponds to their degree of felt powerlessness in off-campus matters. Added to that, his experience in large universities sharpens him to the social and economic conditions of faculty life, for instance, the fact that campus egalitarianism coexists with acute status-consciousness.

For these reasons, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?is a smooth