haha good post

sorry - word count limit:

There are many different theories that are applied this way in literary studies (a great deal of them completely unencumbered by leftist politics); once you have learned how to apply theories then you can decide which ones you find useful to your own work and which ones you would rather leave on the shelf. The purpose of your class is definitely not to force you to agree with Marx, but is probably to give you training in how to apply theory to a literary text. It is less about content than method, if that makes sense.

I know you think your professor is punishing you for having a different political viewpoint than his... do you know how dangerous a thing that would be for a professor to do... it's so unlikely that anyone would do that that I'm almost certain that is not the case.

If you wouldn't mind sharing the title/instructions of your assignment, I'd be interested to see it?

I don't want to derail the thread so am posting this here:

I think you're badly misunderstanding the purpose of your class...it really doesn't matter what you, or your professor, or anyone in your class thinks about Marx's philosophy. I would imagine (drawing on my knowledge and experience of what goes on in English classrooms) that you're being asked to complete an exercise; that exercise is (likely) to use the ideas in Marx's philosophy and apply them to a piece of literature. Whether or not you agree with them should not come into the equation.

	The same way you do before college: strip your clothes, run around in circles, and yell "The prophecy has been fulfilled!"

You win one free interwebs for that :D

I just randomly chose Michigan State U College of Vet Medicine to take a look at their requirements - their web site has an absolute ton of information on what they want applicants to have completed and when and also gives detailed admissions statistics. You should take a look.