I suspect this is more of an American thing. I have 6 years of liberal arts education from the top liberal arts college here in India. A lot of my professors g

I suspect this is more of an American thing. I have 6 years of liberal arts education from the top liberal arts college here in India. A lot of my professors got their PhDs from Ivy League institutions (Berkeley, Yale and Oxbridge). These were also the professors who subscribed heavily to the 'liberal' ethos and focused on those 'feel' arguments you described. In contrast, the old-school professors who studied their whole life here would shoot down your arguments mercilessly if you didn't back them up with facts. You couldn't tell them that you 'felt' that Moby Dick was a symbol of American pioneer spirit; you had to give specific instances, quote research papers to justify your stand. It's true that liberal arts education needs to cleanse itself. There are just too many cool rich kids in humanities who end up dragging not-so-cool, not-so-rich, and not-so-talented kids into humanities majors. All the kids who fit the liberal arts stereotype to a T in my college also came from loaded families (yet, you wouldn't know it if you looked at them). The smartest, and the hardest working, on the other hand, were almost always there because they really, really wanted to do what they were doing.