That reminds me of academia in USSR, where all students, no matter what they were studying, had mandatory subjects like scientific communism and marxism-leninism; and your thesis, no matter if it's about literature, agronomy, astronomy or math had better describe its relevance for the proletariat and communism if it's to be defended.

Some of these preambles (can't link because that all is pre-internet) are quite funny from the modern context (especially those linking abstract sciences e.g. math to the party propaganda), but were treated as quite serious back then.