[Vision2020] This is utterly irrelevant

[Carl Westberg]

But interesting....from the NY Times         
For Law Students With Everything, Dog Therapy for Stress
    By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

 


 

    
Black’s Law Dictionary? Check.        

An Introduction to Legal Reasoning? Check.        

Small, cute dog? Check.        

Yale Law School, renowned for competitiveness and its Supreme Court
 justices, is embarking on a pilot program next week in which students 
can check out a “therapy dog” named Monty along with the library’s 
collection of more than one million books.        

While the law school is saying little so far about its dog-lending 
program, it has distributed a memo to students with the basics: that 
Monty will be available at the circulation desk to stressed-out students
 for 30 minutes at a time beginning Monday, for a three-day trial run.  
      

“It is well documented that visits from therapy dogs have resulted in 
increased happiness, calmness and overall emotional well-being,” Blair 
Kauffman, the law librarian, wrote in an e-mail to students.        

The school is not saying what sort of dog Monty is; what happens to him 
when school is out of session; or how Monty himself may be kept from 
becoming overstressed with all his play dates.        

Sebastian Swett, 26, a second-year student at the law school, said he 
had signed up for a session with the dog, but does not necessarily think
 that it will relieve all the pressures that come with being a student 
at Yale. “I don’t think its going to solve anybody’s anxiety problems, 
but it’s certainly nice to play with a dog for half an hour.”        

Monty, according to the memo to students, is hypoallergenic and will be 
kept in a nonpublic space inside the library, presumably away from those
 who don’t much like dogs.        

“We will need your feedback and comments to help us decide if this will 
be a permanent ongoing program available during stressful periods of the
 semester, for example, during examinations,” the note to students 
reads.        

A handful of other universities offer similar services, including the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.        

Yale Law School has kept its dog-lending plan so quiet that some faculty members were not even aware of it.        

“I’m surprised to hear of it,” said John Witt, a professor who was 
awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship last year for a 
project on the laws of war through American history. “I’ve always found 
library books to be therapeutic. But maybe that’s just me.”        




	






 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20110323/b7e502f0/attachment-0001.html