In Defense of the Liberal Arts Degree/Academic freedom in the UAE

The Chronicle of Higher Education article Why I Didn't go to Dubai is a many layered discussion on the merits of a liberal education. It also provoked very interesting comments, such as the one below:

"What happens in the UAE reinforces my greatest fear about globalization: that the richest and otherwise most powerful few across the globe (that 1% if you include authority as well as money) will collaborate to make suppression of the majority a planet-wide activity. The attacks on the liberal arts in the US, along with the substantial efforts to reduce American higher education to the narrowest possible sort of "job training," are different in degree from what goes on in places like the UAE--but are they really different in kind? Should academic policy be guided by billionaire dropouts who often seem as dismissive (and contemptuous) of higher education now as they were when they fled from it as late adolescents?--often because they didn't want to bother with that "useless" stuff in the liberal arts? What gates should should a college graduate have to go through? "