Just in case you haven’t visited a college campus recently, these are not exactly the easy, lazy, hazy days of higher education. Student anxiety and depression are off the charts. Suicide prevention is a major concern. The long and winding road to pomp and circumstance is paved with stress and tension. And for good reason. A gloomy and uncertain job future has mortgaged-out parents pushing their kids away from liberal arts to science, technology or engineering, regardless of their offspring’s aptitude or interest. As a result, 2016 graduates left campus with an average debt of $37,172, many with a major foisted upon them, and no immediate job prospects.
Relief, however, is in sight. The chieftains of academia put their heads together, probably in multiple conference rooms lined with white boards and coffee urns, to take up the urgent matter of student stress. What to do? What to do? With $1.3 trillion in student debt and climbing, helicopter parents buzzing overhead and a student body stressed to the max, these administrators brainstormed this dilemma with their collective PhD wisdom and came up with a solution: animals.
That’s right. America’s universities and colleges are going to the dogs – and cats, snakes, chinchillas, pigs and small horses – but in a good way. Rather than fix the underlying causes of student stress, like tuition cost and the job market – administrators turned to the animal kingdom as a source of relief. Pet therapy programs, long used by hospitals and nursing homes, have a solid track record in reducing blood pressure, anxiety and depression. And compared with drugs, major medical interventions or eliminating the source of the angst, animals come pretty cheap. That’s how they quickly rose to the top of the white boards.
Yale Law students can check out Monty, a border terrier mix, from the school library for 30 minutes a crack. The University of Connecticut brings cats and dogs in for stress reduction during finals week and to help students cope with their classmates’ suicides. Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia has “puppy rooms” staffed by trained therapy dogs to help stressed out students relax. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York allows students to have their own therapy animals live with them on campus. That makes a variety of dog breeds, along with a menagerie of ponies, snakes and chinchillas, etc. permanent fixtures on the RPI campus.
The trend began with a small number of pets brought in occasionally by nonprofit groups to help with campus stress. It quickly morphed into the RPI approach of allowing students to bring their own pets. As a result of litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Federal Housing Authority regulations, schools receiving federal funds cannot stop students from bringing their therapy animals with them for the entire college ride. These “service animals” do not necessarily need certification, but schools may request a doctor’s letter drawing a nexus between a specific physical or emotional condition and the pet selected to mitigate it.
The University of California at Berkley, birthplace of the 1960s’ free speech movement, has evolved into a virtual Noah’s Ark, with residence halls filled with rabbits, kangaroo rats, pot-bellied pigs, cockatiels, ferrets, ball pythons, Cuban rock iguanas and Chilean rose hair tarantulas, all appropriately leashed, caged and/or vaccinated. Administrators there say they err on the side of letting animals in as a way of helping students cope and keeping litigation costs at a minimum.
All of this is, in a way, kind of sweet and refreshing. Who can object to letting overanxious college kids get some moments of peace and calm from the pet of their choice? Besides PETA, that is. I suspect it is only a matter of time before we hear from the animal rights activists about subjecting dogs, cats, pigs, et al, to the ravages of undergraduate dorm life. Still, in a more perfect world, we would find a way to reduce or eliminate student costs and the helicoptering parents they produce. That way students could enjoy learning on their own with minimum tension, and the animals could return to their own stress-free habitat. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. So cue the therapy iguana. Midterms are coming.