It seems to me that the model of the German research university–that you have to do original research on some topic to earn your Ph.D–is not applicable, and often harmful, when it comes to the Humanities. What we see so often is silly ideas like postmodernism applied to old texts, just so that someone can study Mark Twain and still get their degree.
It seems to me that liberal arts, broadly construed, ought to foster coherent thinking, broad knowledge, and common sense morality. To the extent that people are applying some sort of Positivistic understanding to our culture, they are CREATING culture, and not doing a good job of it, if we measure it by the caliber of thinking being fostered in our graduates.
Far more helpful would be simply maintaining existing knowledge–for example, reading Shakespeare as human beings living in a world that is often strange–rather than trying to apply the same sorts of analytical methods that scientists use.
To be clear, progress itself is virtually impossible to define for most academics, outside of the drumbeats signalling their desire for all of us to abolish our individual differences in favor of a content free tolerance and political submission into a collectivist ideology.
Where, in our modern world, can one find something comparable to the Lincoln-Douglas debates? You are either in or out, and the two never meet. This is anti-liberal education.