A leftist and self-proclaimed “progressive educator,” Professor Berube is candid about the political character of many university English departments. In a 2003 commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he acknowledged that “it’s widely understood that English departments are well stocked with liberals, and I’ve often wished we leftists had less of a presence in literature departments and more of a presence in state legislatures.” 

Professor Berube supported the war in Afghanistan and came under heavy critical fire from more radical leftists for doing so. In September 2002, Professor Berube wrote that the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was “laudable” for having overthrown the Taliban, one of “the worst regimes on the planet.” He questioned the morality of “the anti-imperialists who opposed the war in Afghanistan in stark and unyielding terms,” and who argued, “to their shame, that the U.S. military response was even more morally odious than the hijackers’ deliberate slaughter of civilians.” With the onset of the Iraq War, Professor Berube resumed an orthodox anti-war position.

As Professor Berube himself acknowledges, his literature classes often have little to do with literature. For instance, a class that he has taught for years, “Postmodernism and American Fiction,” is merely a forum for the professor to dilate on the “anti-foundationalist philosophy” of radical philosopher Richard Rorty, a philosophy which among other things leads to moral relativism. Professor Berube regards Rorty’s views as the only views a “sane” person could hold.

By the same token religious people were to be regarded simply as irrational. “In the class,” Professor Berube wrote in May 2000, “we talk about what it means to be an ‘anti-foundationalist’—that is, one of those sane, secular people who believe that it’s best to operate as if our moral and epistemological principles derive not from divine will or uniform moral law, but from ordinary social practices.” 

That Professor Berube’s class promoted his anti-religious prejudices under the guise of “postmodernist theory” and did so at the expense of the literature he had been hired to teach, did not trouble him. On the contrary, “The problem is with the fiction: It just isn’t postmodern enough.” In this context, Professor Berube chastised “accomplished novelists” for failing to “write the kind of stuff that fits into college seminars on postmodernism.”

According to Professor Berube, “The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question—how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.”  In the old Marxist days, for which Professor Berube is obviously nostalgic, this was called the “base-superstructure” question—to what degree a society’s economic base allegedly determined its cultural productions. The idea that Marx’s discredited “science” of human development is “post-modern” rather than pre-modern is one of the quainter notions of academic leftists, which Professor Berube obviously shares.

Professor Berube is more than prepared to defend his idea that a university literature curriculum should be subordinated to his left-wing politics. In a 2002 article for the Association of Departments of English Bulletin, Professor Berube took exception to one professor’s claim that university English departments had become “laughingstocks” because of their overt political agendas. Conceding that English departments had been steadily losing students over the years, Professor Berube was impatient with the notion that the blame for this lack of interest rested with the left wing character of the departments themselves, and their jettisoning of the traditional literary canon in favor of modish political subspecialties under the guise of “literary theory.” By Professor Berube’s lights, the only corrective to the “laughingstock” reputation attached to university English departments should be the introduction of more theory. “If we want to think seriously about graduate programs as institutions of professional training, we should be concentrating on the current status of literary theory,” he explained. “I mean, more or less, the history of Twentieth-Century theories of literature and of textuality, beginning with the work of Viktor Shklovsky and his fellow Russian formalists . . . and running through Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism-deconstruction, feminism, reader-response, new historicism, postcolonialism, and queer theory. . .”

In a 1998 essay called “The Abuses of the University,” Professor Berube described the university as “the final resting place of the New Left,” and the “progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right.” Critics of this definition—in particular those who failed to regard “feminist or queer theory as a legitimate area of scholarship”—were only perpetuating “ignorance and injustice,” he wrote. The idea that a university might be an institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge rather than the imposition of left wing fashions would seem to professors like Michael Berube an idea from a galaxy far away.