“That dilution is pretty easy to restore”
I think you are partly correct, and partly mistaken.
You are right that enforcing rigor is not that difficult in concept.
However, if you actually sought to restore rigor to humanities curricula, you’d have fewer (a lot fewer) students paying tuition.
“Institutions of Higher Learning” are first and foremost money-siphons - they want paying butts in seats and prioritize that much more than they do the rigor of their curricula.
The mission of Academia today is to fleece the stupid, and accidentally educate the able.
How does restoring rigor fit into this? It doesn’t.
I can’t disagree. Not that the disease is universal. I have a good friend who has returned to school to get his degree in Psychology and is now (I mean, like five minutes ago) lamenting how difficult the research statistics courses are. He has named his professor “Ms Sympathy” and quoted her saying something like, “you can get the concepts without this but you can’t measure whether or not they’re true. What is truth? Truth is, you aren’t getting a degree without passing the course.” I’m guessing she’s used that line before...