I agree that humanities are not worthless, but I think I (and the author) would probably agree on what that utility is: the university is where people think delicate thoughts, and essentially lead the rest of us in how we think about a person, an era, a trend, a concept. The humanities are all about perception, and there is infinite newness to be gleaned from looking at every part of history, which is only very partially (in both senses) recorded. The humanities are, collectively, our imperfect attempt to define a consensus of what happened, what it meant, and why a new perspective might be important (or at least interesting) to modern people. (And since humanities people are happy to trigger off of other humanities people, we wouldn't even need any new events, history, or art to keep the machine going; it would just endlessly rehash it's own interpretations endlessly.)