I wrote this yesterday but didn’t post, and it looks like others have gotten to this point already, so if they have, my apologies.
To the OP’s original question about defunding the Liberal Arts, a simple answer: No.
The problem that people focus on is ensuring that STEMmers study some humanities and social science but I think the bigger problem is actually not humanities/SS majors. At my son’s graduation, the president of the university gave a painful speech applauding the increase in the number of students who took poetry classes (she made a name for herself resurrecting a formerly obscure German poet). But the real problem is that a very high proportion of humanities majors and a reasonably high proportion of social science majors don’t learn statistics or computer science in a world in which data is and will drive decisions and software will delete jobs. Yes, the SS major are forced to take a methods course or stats for psych, but these courses are formulaic and they learn nothing about the logic of probability or statistics. Many of the decisions one confronts as an adult are decisions under uncertainty. We have to decide what medical treatment to take (if any), what job to take, which candidate to vote for etc. All of these are decisions in which there is uncertainty and often some data, but most people don’t know rudimentary decision analysis or how to draw conclusions from data. Whole businesses are already run from harvesting data about people’s browsing choices or shopping choices, the weather, financial markets, etc. And, it is clear that most Americans have little if any understanding of the scientific method. This stuff matters to our political decision-making. I think STEMmers should have some exposure to humanities/SS but as far as I can tell, most do. But even more important is ensuring that the non-STEMmers have exposure to real statistics, programming and the scientific method.