When generals prepare to “fight the last war,” as the saying goes, they’re bound to be surprised by new enemies deploying new tactics over new terrain. On the evidence of Bruce Bawer’s fighting-mad book, “The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind,” this rule holds true for the academic culture wars as well.

Bawer is a refugee from the academy. He earned a Ph.D. in English in the 1980s and made his mark in 1993 with a sensitive and forward-looking book, “A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society.” It was an eloquent call for gay people to stand up against those on the political and religious right who judged them unfit for full citizenship, as well as against those on the academic left who insisted that to be proudly “queer” one must be “transgressive and oppositional” with respect to all cultural norms, and that to be otherwise was to be a sellout and a fraud.

Bawer takes justifiable pride in the contribution he made to the “sea change” that has since taken place for gays in America, most of whom “weren’t the political extremists or sexual subversives that both the antigay right and gay left said we were” — and for whom the United States is a much less hostile place now than it was even 20 years ago. In the late ’90s, he left the country, first for Amsterdam, then for Oslo, where he has continued to write on social and political themes — notably the threat that he believes “radical Islam” poses to the future of Europe.

A couple of years ago, Bawer made a trip home to see what’s happened to the academic world he left behind. He attended a few conferences for women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and Chicano studies, where he heard plenty of cant, as when a participant at a “Fat Studies” conference explained her veganism by declaring: “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother.” He found, in abundance, what he’s looking for: ­jargon-spewing careerists posing as radicals, semiliterate professors of literature and widespread condemnation of reason itself as a hoax perpetrated by the powerful on the powerless. Based on this sample, he concludes that the contemporary American academy is a place of hypocrisy and fear, where tenured professors proclaim empty solidarity with exploited workers, and Take Back the Night rallies promote the idea that “male students metamorphose, werewolf-like, into potential rapists” every night.