Most of us college students feel great frustration when we recognize the daft rationale behind taking a General Studies course. Somehow this re-do, crash course of high school learning is still widely accepted. Few connect the dots and realize that the university system is out to line its pockets with our parents’ money.

Entering the third semester of my college career, this concept isn’t entirely new to me. I’ve felt like each semester, I waste more time and more money relearning subjects I’ve already taken in high school. This semester in particular, it has come as no surprise that mainstream biology would attempt its best to silently coerce my fellow students and I into being good little Democrats.

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[lz_infobox]This piece is part of a CampusZette series exploring the culture, oddities and experiences of students on college campuses through their eyes.[/lz_infobox]

I won’t mislead you. For the majority of the course, I took the usual 20 -year-old conservative college student approach to tackling the global warming or climate change lessons. I rolled my eyes and gave the answers my professor wanted to hear. After all, I am here to obtain a degree by any means necessary, aside from academic dishonesty. Sad, isn’t it? We have to check boxes that don’t exist just to get a diploma that realistically may or may not assist us in attaining a job in the future.

My reaction to left-wing biology changed, however, when the professor started rambling about abortion. I say rambling, because she wasn’t really talking. She wasn’t informing us. She wasn’t even trying to convince us that abortion was a good thing. She was speaking as though abortion was a noncontroversial, matter of fact, side story to her rant about population control. Without question, abortion is an absolute necessity if we want to, in her own words, “keep the population from growing out of control.”

This time, when I bit my tongue, my fists began to clench and my palms began to sweat. I remember feeling my toes curl in my socks as my mind found the words I wanted to say in that moment. “Really, so the sanctioned domestic genocide of millions of unborn children is necessary to keep the population from booming?!”

Perhaps now I know why we must retake menial General Studies courses. In case it wasn’t taught to use with a liberal bent when in high school, they’ll get their liberal ideology through the second time.

Zachary Letourneau is a sophomore at Pennsylvania State University.