I think you are doing it some disservice. Critically analyzing a piece of literature is similar to deconstruction a programming puzzle. It involves finding patterns & relations between characters and events. It involves summarizing and breaking your ideas in sections.
Even for something as ridiculously subjective as art, you can still have a formalized course. Ask students to set a goals or make a proposal of what they want to accomplish, then grade them on how well they accomplished that.
> Back in college I remember some of the humanities profs were known to be liberal and others were conservative.
In my American college (certainly a mediocre school, not a fancy shmancy Ivy League) I had most professors behave rationally. Even the super liberal feminist professors graded fairly those that wrote well research and well-thought out paper. So that is mostly about bad professors than it is necessarily about some fundamental flaw in the subjects.
On anther level I agree. There are too many students going into those fields expecting to eventually get jobs in that field. That will just not happen. I think someone needs to sit down and have a chat with them.
On the other hand, school teaches bad lessons as well as good.
I just finished a summer Composition course. Turned in a paper which was nitpicked down to an 85 percent. The next stage of the assignment was to expand this paper with more sources and roughly 500 more words. I changed nothing which was nitpicked, added my sources, and the added sources accounted for the additional word count so I called it done, since I was so sick of this instructor.
The final paper grade was a 98 percent and labelled one of the best papers he had ever seen, despite the fact that all my so-called errors, which had previously annoyed him, were still in the paper.
Even though I am pursuing a BS, I had always thought the STEM / Liberal Arts dichotomy was silly. Humanities professors, including this Composition instructor, are quickly changing my mind. I'm sure my luck will run out eventually, but every science and math course so far has been mostly objective and whatever score I get (all A's so far) is purely dependent upon my efforts. Based on the Composition instructor, as well as other humanities professors I've had, my grade is partially based on effort and partially a matter of what he had for breakfast that day. Really makes me want to write off entire departments as completely worthless.
The algorithm that works best in the liberal arts is "guess what the teacher wants to hear and say it."
The horrible truth is that this is an unreasonably effective algorithm for functioning in management. At worst, it's used by scam artists like Madoff and Ken Lay. Many executives have left a trail of destruction, moving from one company to another just before reality sets in.
If there's any attribute that will cause mankind to end up like the dinosaurs, it's like this. It's got everything to do with our inability to deal with problems like global warming and it drives the everyday mediocrity that drags us down.
Back in college I remember some of the humanities profs were known to be liberal and others were conservative. Students who had different politics frequently believed they weren't graded fairly.
The mediocracy hates STEM and has waged a war against math because, often, we can say results in STEM are objectively right or wrong.
For instance, one time I pointed out an error that a math prof made on the board and he was happy to be corrected -- it's a bit of evidence that he's succeeding at his job. But after class, a student told me he was shocked that I'd been arrogant enough to think the teacher was wrong!
On the other hand, if you don't agree with what a humanist says about Shakespeare, for instance, she might reply that "different people can believe different things" or she can be bullheaded and not admit the subjective element.
I remember having a English teacher in high school who was the most respected, but I couldn't get better than a "D" in her class because she thought I couldn't write.
A few years later I had a strech when I got most of my income from writing and copy editing so there.