I disagree.
I'm not just reflexively saying I disagree period, I just mean to say its not that simple. MIT is a great school, but that doesn't mean we should do everything they do. The bigger question is do we want to continue to be an elite STEM school or not? The world is full of extremely intelligent folks who major in liberal arts stuff, but is that where we want to branch out? My current opinion is no. I would be open to arguments to the contrary. But my current opinion is that we shouldn't try to be a jack of all trades, which can lead to master of nothing.
I see where you are coming from, but I think you are a little behind the curve on where the "liberal arts" have been heading. First - and I'm sure you know this - the social sciences have become more data analysis oriented. And I mean on steroids: most of the advances in quantitative and qualitative analysis are driven by questions from the social sciences and analyzed by techniques originating there. Shoot, Google hires social scientists just to keep up with the trends (you can check). A lot of new techniques that are driven - hand to God - by cooperation between computer scientists and
philosophers. The philosophers are interested in how to make sound causal inferences from non-experimental data. So are the computer scientists, for different reasons. And all of that is driven by social scientists with the same questions.
Second, more and more quantitive work is being done by the humanities (again, hand to God). English and lit programs are doing more and more text analysis to quantitatively test theories of literary analysis and that's just the tip of the iceberg. History programs have developed huge databases they are using to analyze empirical hypotheses about the past. Example: they've been using a computerized version of the census of Florence to answer questions about 14th and 15th centuries when that city was developing the first wave of capitalism. About the only thing you don't see these days is empirical work on the existence of God, though text analysis of the Gospels, for instance, is already an old story.
In short, the kind of things they do at MIT are by no means foreign to the focus of a place like Tech. Granted, some of the stuff they do up there wouldn't fit as easily, but a whole lot would. If Tech wants a wider range of majors, iow, a case can be made for them