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Disciplinary definitions and 'boundaries' are cultural constructs, context-based and subject to conventions. Historical, technical, cultural, gender, social, political conditions are among the forces that shape the multidimensional space of such definitions. Rules and regulations often dismiss complexity, or have to reduce it. The division between 'hard science' and 'humanities' is one of the results, but more detailed examples can be found in the history and practice of individual disciplines, like musicology. Among scholars involved in 'humanities' in Europe and Northern America there has been a growing feeling that their disciplines be under attack, and that the only path to survival be the acceptation of 'hard science' as a model. The risk that such a strategy may bring to an impoverishment of scholarship, favoring an ill-defined and ineffective form of empiricism, must be considered, especially if one looks at the long-term plans of institutions like the European Research Council. In this paper, I will try to place the subject into the more ample framework of the changes in political and economical systems in the West from the 1970s (which brought to the current economical crisis), of the ongoing processes aiming to reduce or abolish public welfare, including public universities.