I am a member of the first Hopkins class for which the completion of the Foundational Ability (FA) credits has been mandatory for students in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (KSAS). Throughout my time here, I have heard many compelling arguments — some of which have appeared in The News-Letter before — against the restrictive liberal arts requirements, especially drawing on the history of Hopkins as a specialized research institution. These arguments are compelling, though slightly incomplete. Most of the prior pleas for the system’s repeal have come from STEM students forced to take humanities courses. This is natural, as certain humanities departments — like International Studies, my own major — have pre-existing requirements that already demand students take courses that span the current FAs. Despite this, the influx of STEM majors into humanities classes, degrading the quality of discussion-based humanities courses, has made the FAs just as harmful to non-STEM majors within KSAS.
Having diverse perspectives is incredibly important and rightfully celebrated at Hopkins and other elite institutions. Even so, there are certain situations in which the ability of a STEM major to contribute in a humanities class based on their unique lived experience is reliant on their willingness to do so, which FA requirements interfere with.
During my freshman year, two of my floormates, both of whom were pre-med STEM majors in KSAS, took Introduction to Fiction and Poetry (IFP) in order to fulfill their FA1 Writing and Communication requirement. Throughout the semester, I watched idly as they continuously used ChatGPT to produce poetry. Beyond my concerns for their personal development, I wondered how this was impacting the quality of class discussion and participation — surely they were not the only STEM students using the introductory Writing Seminars class as an easy way to fulfill their requirements. Later on, in The News-Letter Gatehouse, I asked some fellow editors about their experiences in IFP as humanities majors; they affirmed my assumption that discussions were often filled with uninformed and uninspired contributions by non-Writing Seminars majors. On top of that, they expressed difficulty registering for the class in the first place, which is necessary for their major, due to the increased demand.
This conundrum indicates that, instead of inspiring interdisciplinary exploration and the expansion of the breadth of undergraduates’ knowledge, fulfilling the FAs is an annoying chore for STEM students and a hurdle to deeper learning for humanities students. In the current age of technology, STEM students naturally employ AI and other forms of academic dishonesty to complete this chore, further weakening the quality of the humanities courses they choose.
The aspect of this issue that is unique to the humanities is twofold. First, humanities majors are more likely to be able to fulfill their FAs within the realm of their own majors — as an International Studies and History major, I have not been forced to explore beyond my existing major requirements in order to fulfill my FA credits. Because of this, humanities students who are less familiar with general STEM concepts are not populating introductory STEM courses against their will. The second issue is that, because many upper-level courses in the humanities do not require prerequisites — something more common among STEM courses — STEM students also populate upper-level courses.
The phenomenon of having STEM students without humanities backgrounds or relevant experience in upper-level humanities courses is something I am intimately familiar with. During this semester alone, I have enrolled in both 200- and 300-level History courses with significant populations of STEM students who openly admit that they have chosen the courses simply to fulfill a requirement. I can only assume that this is why the professors of these courses go on to assure the class that no prior experience is needed to succeed.
Hearing such comments is what inspired me to write this piece in the first place. Previously, I accepted TAs having to explain the foundational elements of Rousseau’s philosophy, the Opium Wars, or the Articles of Confederation as a painful but inevitable fact of life. In hearing professors, especially in upper-level courses, assert that no prior knowledge of history is necessary for the class, I began to wonder whether the quality of my education was being impacted by the necessity for STEM students to take humanities courses, and whether their syllabi had been edited since STEM students flooded into their classes on account of the FA system.
If 3 of 15 necessary credits in the Science and Data FA2 requirement can apply to Elements of Microeconomics, a requirement for an International Studies major, there is no reason that a given course in, for example, the Medicine, Science, and Humanities department cannot also be tagged with the Culture and Aesthetics FA3. Separately, the reason humanities students are not fulfilling their FAs by taking, for example, Physical Chemistry I, a 300-level Chemistry course, is not only because they can fulfill their requirements elsewhere in a more relevant field — it’s because they are systematically prevented from doing so. In this way, the system recognizes that admitting humanities students to upper-level STEM courses would naturally interfere with the efficiency and rigor of the course and uses pre-requisites to prevent that. Why is the same principle not applied to the humanities?
The University therefore has three options if it decides to rectify this issue: cross-list more STEM courses with more humanities-related FAs so that students can use relevant coursework to fulfill them; create explicit prerequisites for humanities courses; or abandon the FA project entirely. The blame does not lie with the STEM student. It lies only with the University, which failed to consider the decreased rigor of humanities courses that are natural when the FA system is implemented in its current form. Those costs are not worth the appearance of offering a more liberal arts-based education to onlookers while students pay.
Julia Schager is a junior majoring in International Studies and History from Stamford, Conn. She is a Copy Editor for The News-Letter.
