Foundational Ability Requirements Undermine Humanities Education at Johns Hopkins

I’m part of the first class at the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences where everyone has to log a set number of Foundational Ability (FA) credits. When the requirement rolled out, the campus buzz was full of complaints—mostly from STEM majors who felt forced into a humanities class they didn’t need. Those arguments made sense, but they left a gap: they didn’t consider how the same policy hurts students whose majors are in the humanities.

Take my own experience in International Studies. My major already bundles a handful of writing‑and‑communication courses that count toward the FA‑1 requirement, so I haven’t had to wander into an unrelated lab just to check a box. That sounds fine, right? Not quite. Because the system forces a flood of STEM majors into the same introductory humanities seminars, the classroom dynamic shifts. In my freshman year, two pre‑med students enrolled in Introduction to Fiction and Poetry solely to satisfy FA‑1. I watched, half‑amused and half‑concerned, as they leaned on ChatGPT to churn out poems. Their papers weren’t the problem; the real issue was the ripple effect on class discussion. When a handful of students coast through assignments with AI, the conversation stalls, and genuine engagement drops.

It’s not just the lower‑division seminars that feel the strain. Upper‑level history and literature courses, which traditionally assume a baseline of literary or historical knowledge, are now peppered with students who admit they’re there only to meet an FA requirement. Professors often pre‑empt this by telling the class, “No prior experience needed,” a statement that, while inclusive, can feel like a concession to the policy rather than an academic choice. I’ve sat in 300‑level history lectures where half the room was full of engineering majors—people whose academic training rarely touches the primary sources we dissect.

Why does this matter? Humanities courses thrive on nuanced debate, close reading, and a shared vocabulary that develops over time. When a class is constantly replenished with newcomers who are either disengaged or using shortcuts, the depth of analysis suffers. Meanwhile, STEM students, who are adept at leveraging technology, find an easy way to clear the requirement, often at the expense of genuine learning.

There’s a stark asymmetry here. In the sciences, prerequisites act as gatekeepers; a chemistry major can’t just drop into an advanced quantum mechanics class without the proper background. Humanities departments rarely employ the same safeguards, allowing anyone—regardless of preparation—to enroll in a senior literature seminar. This mismatch fuels the problem.

So what can be done? I see three practical pathways for the university:

• Cross‑list more STEM courses with humanities‑oriented FA tags. If a chemistry class can count toward a culture‑and‑aesthetics FA, then a humanities major could satisfy that requirement without leaving their disciplinary home.
• Introduce clear prerequisites for upper‑level humanities courses. Requiring, for example, an introductory survey of European history before a 300‑level diplomatic history class would preserve rigor.
• Re‑evaluate the FA distribution. Rather than forcing all students into a fixed set of humanities seminars, allow a broader menu of courses—including interdisciplinary ones—so that both STEM and humanities majors can meet requirements in a way that aligns with their interests and career goals.

None of these solutions demand a radical overhaul; they simply ask the administration to recognize that a one‑size‑fits‑all requirement is doing more harm than good, especially for the very students the humanities aim to serve. Until the policy is fine‑tuned, we’ll continue to see classrooms where the conversation stalls, and where a requirement feels more like a bureaucratic obstacle than a chance for true interdisciplinary growth.