They were required when I was in school. The thing I find funny is that, in contrast to the post, it was the humanities professors one had to parrot in written papers. Once I stopped trying to interpret what we were reading and just wrote down the lecture notes everything was good. Good meaning a passing grade. It was odd that the freedom to interpret text was less than some engineering courses.
This was just concerning the courses that were actually called Humanities 101, etc. The language classes, economics and others could be selected from just about anything in the liberal arts college--these I do agree help form a more rounded education.