Colleges have always changed shape and form, and today they've grown into what Clark Kerr calls the "Multiversity" in The Uses of the University (http://www.amazon.com/The-Uses-University-Essentials-Governm...), which is worth reading if you're interested in such issues.
Beyond that, philosophy and classics are interesting citations because the healthy, important parts of philosophy have mostly been shucked into science (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, or William James's Pragmatism) and classics are interesting but the corpus is static; it is not easy to come up with new and interesting things to say about The Iliad
In 1946, I'm sure someone was writing about the decline of theology and Latin and lamenting the failure of the American experiment.
(Despite what I wrote above I am still against the giving of scholarships for sports and think that the pro sports run by big-deal programs should be treated as professions, which they are by any reasonable standard of the word).
Beyond that, philosophy and classics are interesting citations because the healthy, important parts of philosophy have mostly been shucked into science (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, or William James's Pragmatism) and classics are interesting but the corpus is static; it is not easy to come up with new and interesting things to say about The Iliad
In 1946, I'm sure someone was writing about the decline of theology and Latin and lamenting the failure of the American experiment.
(Despite what I wrote above I am still against the giving of scholarships for sports and think that the pro sports run by big-deal programs should be treated as professions, which they are by any reasonable standard of the word).