I said what follows to someone but should gather good defenses of the humanities here.
“Well, humanities profs don’t always respect their own discipline so they define it in terms of skills only. This is partly the fault of Teaching Goals where you are supposed to be training students to do things. My department now says we are teaching intercultural awareness and communication/perceptiveness skills for international business and NGO work (students in that track don’t even study a language beyond the level of the minor, so we’ve given up on advanced language proficiency as a goal, never mind anything else). How would you defend the humanities (and the arts)?”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 