To “round out” our education engineering students were required to take liberal arts courses. It was a requirement that these courses be entirely academic with “no practical value.” That quote was from the dean of engineering, as I wanted to take a few biology labs in lieu of “art.”
When I got to that side of campus I was appalled. Students were so stoned in the film class they couldn’t tell you that Humphrey Bogart had starred in the “Maltese Falcon” five minutes after we’d seen it. I talked to quite a few students trying to determine why and how they were there. Many were on grants or student loans. They were obviously there to party, not work.
The degrees the liberal arts majors were getting were useless. I talked to one guy who had been working on his PhD. in Russian Art Literature. I asked what that would prepare him to do and he said, “Teach Russian Art Literature.” It was a narrow field and he said he’d have to wait for his major professor to retire.
Political science was on the plate as a humanity where I went, as was history. I dabbled in history but that soon became, well, history. It became political science, anthropology, earth science, the mushy sciences. But not art. A good drawing artist I never was. Much later I found a forte in music, pardon the pun. But that was without the help of any university.