The Guardian has an essay by Terry Eagleton on The death of universities. The article asks (and answers),
Are the humanities about to disappear from our universities? The question is absurd. It would be like asking whether alcohol is about to disappear from pubs, or egoism from Hollywood. Just as there cannot be a pub without alcohol, so there cannot be a university without the humanities. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.
I wish I were so sure of this logical argument, but I fear that people are quite willing to call something a university even without many of the humanities just as the university in centuries past was just as much a university for not having many of the fields now seen as essential (like Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Bioinformatics, even Engineering.)
I can imagine a university where many of the humanities end up in the Faculty of Education (which does prepare people for jobs as teachers.) We would have the department of English Education, for example. Would people bemoan the loss of the humanities if many of its questions ended up housed elsewhere?
For that matter there are some that argue that preserving the humanities may be a cloak for preserving a particular idea of humanism. For example, here is Tony Davies at the end of his excellent short book Humanism:
All humanisms, until now, have been imperial. They speak of the human in the accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a race, a genome. Their embrace suffocates those whom it does not ignore. (p. 141; location 2372 in Kindle)
To claim that a university would not be a university if it didn’t maintain a particular collection of intellectual traditions would be begging the question (actually begging all sorts of questions). We simply can’t expect a historical definition to save what we care for. We must be part of the ongoing definition whether as collaborators or critics, which raises the question of how far to collaborate and when to dig in heels and yell like hell?