Posted in the dunk tank because I expect to be dunked on.
So I got in a discussion with a friend that someone they knew was hardworking because they were doing a degree in music theory on a PhD track while also juggling multiple jobs. I was impressed with all the jobs this person was doing, but I said that music theory as a degree is absurd and most liberal arts degrees are related to professional bullshitting (re: writing useless essays about a specific quality of something) than they are about something socially useful so I didn't find that aspect impressive at all. In my eyes, the socially useful thing about a music theory degree would be applying this idea to make good music, or to teach others about it. Notably, music theory is not about engineering a stage for good acoustics, nor is it about building instruments. It leads to nothing tangible, but rather is a sort of meta-analysis of music as a whole. Its possible to receive a music theory degree while making bad music. And bad music and good music is wholly subjective, its possible to put on a very musically skillful display and have no one like it, or not be interesting enough that a good swath of people enjoy it.
Compare this to, say, an architecture degree. There can be artistic expression in architecture, but its incredibly important to put people through a degree program for rigor to avoid architectural deficiencies which can kill people. The point here is that any sort of rigor drilled into someone in a music theory PhD pipeline has questionable benefits, and is likely a waste of time and labor. However, it is possible that it would be useful to have music theory certifications that are relatively quick, cheap, and potentially free to get to help teach musicians music theory to improve their art, maximizing social benefits. And I think that is something that can be applied to a lot of liberal art degrees.
Maybe this is colored by the way my grandma taught me about Socialist Czechoslovakia. There were benefits for artists, but people could only get free/subsidized degrees if they went to do something very practical such as architecture, engineering, science, and so on. Which is why so much socialist art is baked into something practical, like housing.
For starters, there's no hard difference between creating art and theorizing it. Arnold Schönberg was one of the greatest composers of the 20th-century and he also wrote multiple (incredibly technical) textbooks on music theory. Bertolt Brecht was a socialist intellectual and writer of theater plays (who once antagonized the cultural functionaries of the GDR by standing up for a play deemed insufficiently patriotic). I cannot put a dollar value on his work but I am sure that socialism has to free humanity from the relentless pursuit of maximum efficiency in every aspect of society. And given that even in Western states, a minuscule amount of public funds is sufficient to support an incredible number of universities and PhDs, I find it hard to believe that that is an inefficiency we could no longer afford under socialism.
So I don't disagree. My point is that in a transitionary state there are limited resources and we MUST maximize efficiency or people will die. And I also think its unethical to waste people's time on minutiae that doesn't actually impact the field or improve social outcomes in any way. Its possible that a good musician could write a treatise on good music, but why do you need a PhD to understand the treatise? Is it insufficient for someone to get a short certificate to say they know how to read musical treatises and teach them to people? To me, this just seems like gatekeeping to say you need 10+ years of study to understand or research something in a degree that isn't mission critical.
The first point is an empirical matter. Maybe after some wars and revolutions, there really will be no resources left for anything except immediate survival, but that seems too far from our current world to speculate about. The second point is the kind of problem studied by the disciplines you would like to see defunded: How does understanding relate to teaching? What are the prerequisites to understanding a technical text? How much can they -- or education as a whole, to cut to the chase -- be standardized? Suffice to say, there is no checklist of the knowledge you need to read a difficult text because it is less a matter of knowledge and more one of education, community and time. And that's precisely what a PhD (ideally) gives to a person: not the permission to understand, but the ability to.