VCU students with ethical or religious objections to dissection may now earn either a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree without participating in academic exercises they find ethically or religiously objectionable.
This new policy exists thanks to the dedication of your student body president, Zmarak Khan, to Dr. Smock, Chair of the Biology Department, whose clear vision of scientific trends made him an ally in both the development and implementation of this policy, to Dr. Huff, Vice Provost for Life Sciences, who supported this policy from conception, to the sponsorship of the VCU Student Services Committee, which unanimously voted to take this issue to the Student Senate, and to the Senate, which passed Resolution SEN 08-2005 on February 21st with zero abstaining, 34 in favor and only one against.
SEN 08-2005 is called the Non-Dissection Paths Resolution because it provides that VCU students will be offered non-dissection or alternative-offering courses that fulfill core requirements for any major, and that whether the student is seeking a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree, obvious and unobstructed paths will be maintained for those who wish to obtain their degrees without participating in animal dissection.
As bachelor of arts students taking the non-biology major laboratory course BIOZ 101L were already offered the choice to dissection alternatives, science majors had only one required core biology course to contend with if they too wanted to earn their degree without participating in animal dissection: BIOZ 152L.
In the past, whether or not a student in this class was allowed to use alternatives to dissection depended on the individual instructor and the matter was largely decided by chance. But beginning this semester, students in BIOZ 152L classes were informed via class syllabi and verbal announcement from their instructors that if they had ethical or religious objections to dissection, they too would be offered alternatives.
Since I was five, I’ve wanted to be a veterinarian. But my dream was interrupted when, in my seventh grade biology class, we dissected a worm, a frog, a fetal pig and a cat. If you’d have asked me then, I couldn’t have told you that I had an ethical objection to animal dissection. All I knew was that I didn’t like it, it didn’t feel right and I didn’t want to do it.
Throughout my high school years – and my first college degree – I chose a path of conscious avoidance. I studied business communications instead. I went into advertising and made television commercials and glossy magazine ads about laptop computers.
Ironically enough, back in the late 80s, when I was still a communications student, there were murmurings amongst a few about how computers would create a revolution in the advertising industry. Feeling safely of the majority opinion, I scoffed at the idea. But I gladly ate my words later, learning a vital lesson: Evolution happens.
Advertising wasn’t the only field revolutionalized by technology. Today, we’re using computers to map the human genome, computer modeling has made it possible to study disease at the molecular level, future doctors are learning innovative surgical techniques by watching satellite broadcasts of expert surgeons working on live patients on the other side of the planet, universities – including VCU – have developed academic programs which combine the disciplines of biological science with computer engineering and – finally – if you’re an undergraduate student at VCU, you can now learn the internal structures and functions of an animal by dissecting a virtual organism on a desktop PC.
There have been many studies published in some of the top scientific journals demonstrating that students using alternatives learn as well or better than students participating in traditional animal dissection exercises. UC Berkeley, Cornell and the University of Illinois are a few of the other universities that also give their undergraduate students the right not to dissect. Furthermore, 100 out of 126 medical schools in the United States today, including Harvard, Stanford and Yale, have eradicated animal laboratories from their curricula in favor of modern alternatives.
Because of these new alternatives – and the efforts of people dedicated to the continual development of methods for teaching biological concepts without the waste of animal life – there exist in the world today scientists, medical doctors and yes, even veterinarians, who have never had to harm an animal in the pursuit of their educations. For those of us who want to be one of them – thanks to VCU – we now can.