At the end of the play Apollo arrives and turns the Furies into Eumanides - Humanities, who comfort Oerestes. The humanities were created to heal us, but in modern academia, they have been turned back into shrieking furies, and the response we are seeing -- the only sane response -- is to flee them like Oerestes did.
There are still humanities out there, and it is important to seek them out, but you wont them in modern humanities departments.
As for their emphasis in higher education, where else are you forced to face different and conflicting ideas? Certainly not in political debates.
For example:
UT Austin English (Humanities, no?) major requirements (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/undergraduate-program...) and spring 2020 courses (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/courses/index.php).
Or maybe UT Austin Philosophy requirements (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/philosophy/undergraduate/The%...) and spring 2020 courses (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/philosophy/courses/index.php). (Hey! Philosophy is still teaching 313 Symbolic Logic!) (Aww. Bob Mugerauer isn't teaching Contemporary Moral Problems. He's probably retired. But he was great; he looked like Captain Kangaroo. Dan Bonevac is teaching intro from his World Philosophy text. Cool.)
Anyway, most of undergraduate humanities are surveys of various sorts, with the specific goals of getting students to present arguments coherently.
(Hey! Computer Science is no longer requiring PHL 313K, or automata theory. They're dead to me now.)
There is only one set of ideas that truly experiences freedom of thought and inquiry in the humanities in Western universities, and that’s the progressive far left worldview. This cultural bias skews the humanities far more than it does STEM. You can see it institutionalized in the *-studies majors (e.g. ethnic studies), which have relatively little academic rigor. And because the humanities are so often skewed, I disagree with the notion that it makes students well rounded.
Without room for conflicting views, critical inquiry, and freedom of thought, the humanities seem to have devolved into a propaganda machine that teaches just this worldview. It is a ubiquitous enough problem that entire news outlets have been created to track the disturbing saga of college monoculture in America: https://www.thecollegefix.com/
"There is only one set of ideas that truly experiences freedom of thought and inquiry in the humanities in Western universities, and that’s the progressive far left worldview."
has been the complaint since before I was born (which was a long time ago) and "what are they teaching kids these days" has probably been the complaint since universities were first founded.
The ideal of the humanities and of the holistic, cosmopolitan citizen with a broad education in every field of human activity is not new. Humboldt (and others) formulated it long ago.
In that sense I think the humanities aren't just needed in education. They're needed in churches, in political debates, in homes and families. Humanities as a practice rather than as a four-year degree.
If you really want to democratice and popularize the humanities don't treat them as a grooming mechanism for leaders or an intellectual exercise as is common in the anglosphere, but as a part of everyday life.