My aim in this work is to identify and contextualize the goals driving contemporary post-secondary education reform in New Brunswick. I do this by grounding the 2007 Advantage New Brunswick Report and New Brunswick Action Plan in the general historical context of higher education. I provide a descriptive account of the policies under review with a view to the ideals of a liberal arts education. Through a critical theory framework, I relate the contents of the policies under review to neo-liberal ideology, professional, bureaucratic and managerial hegemony. My focus is on the place of the liberal arts and humanities in a system dominated by the corporate imperatives of professionalization, specialization and bureaucratization. I propose as a response to neo-liberal policies that seek to make education instrumental to the needs of the market returning to history, philosophy and classics as the core of a liberal arts education.