Pondering the nature of humanity -- province of the rich?

A recent NY Times article on the urgent need for humanities departments at universities to justify themselves in light of tough economic times closed with this dispiriting quote:

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy.

That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman [a law professor at Yale] said. The essence of a humanities education -- reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming "to grips with the question of what living is for" -- may become "a great luxury that many cannot afford."

What crap.

Reading the great books can be done for free, if you don't mind reading them online at Google Books, or if you're Neanderthal enough to use a library.  As for grappling with, as another scholar put it, "what it means to be a human being," you don't need money for that, either.  In fact, being utterly impoverished is perhaps the best prescription for wrestling with the meaning of human existence. 

The "great luxury" is not the inquiry that animates any humanities curriculum, but rather a course of study at an elite university.  It's typical of the myopia of professors at such institutions to confuse graduating from an ivory tower with getting an "education."  Such snobbishness also feeds growing perceptions (incorrect, in my view) that education in the humanities is useless.

On the contrary, what's of decreasing use in our ever-more-globalized world is the silly notion that wealth and prestige protect one from the vicissitudes of life.  This lesson is one that Americans (and especially American hedge-fund managers) are loathe to learn.  A genuine education in the humanities would rectify that mistake.