Members of the animal rights student group Justice For All are fighting to convince Northwestern’s biological sciences department to implement a permanent program for students opposed to participating in animal dissections.
But biology professors say their current stance of allowing each instructor to choose an alternative is adequate — and that a streamlined policy would go against their goal of moving science forward though new educational strategies.
Justice For All President Tricia Valcarcel met with Associated Student Government Academic Vice President Prajwal Ciryam on Wednesday to discuss ways to bring her group’s concerns to the department. ASG passed a bill in February backing the creation of a standardized dissection-alternatives policy.
Valcarcel said by next week she hopes to meet with members of the biology faculty to discuss enacting a new alternative policy for cell biology and physiology, a Spring Quarter class that performs a frog dissection. Her proposal asks that the department guarantee the alternative assignment will occur at the same time as normal laboratory dissections and will be of equal educational value.
Valcarcel, a Weinberg senior, said a permanent policy would ensure students receive the same opportunities each year. She said Justice For All is concerned the alternative assignment used in this year’s biology lab did not offer students the same experience.
When Valcarcel took biology, she performed a computer simulation of a frog dissection. But when Lauren Pierce took the course this spring, her assignment was to write a two- to three-page paper about an alternative to dissection.
“I was expecting something that would more closely resemble the actual dissection, like a computer simulation,” said Pierce, a Weinberg sophomore.
She said the assignment was more difficult and required more time than the actual dissection.
But neurobiology and physiology Prof. Jon Levine, director of the biological sciences program, said he thinks Justice For All members are making a “nonissue” into something larger because they “simply continue to say that we have no policy, when in fact we do have a policy, and it works just fine.”
Levine said a standardized policy would not benefit the biological sciences department because scientific ideas and methods always are changing.
“I think that (Justice For All members) have a very naive view of science education if they think that it is a fixed body of information that is simply imparted the same way and to the same extent year after year,” he said.
Valcarcel called Levine’s argument “a poor excuse not to have a policy” and said Justice For All members would be open to writing a clause into the permanent policy allowing administrators to change the alternative in three or four years if technology advances.
Valcarcel also said she hopes ASG’s support will convince administrators that dissection alternatives are important to all of campus.
“(The bill) shows that the student body cares about this issue as well,” said Valcarcel, a Weinberg senior. “It’s not just our small group.”
She also said she hopes the success of students at the University of Illinois might help Justice For All in its efforts to change the policy at NU. At the beginning of May, Illinois’ student government voted to adopt a dissection-alternatives policy that requires professors to provide alternatives and to alert students of these options during registration.
“We’ll definitely use it as a bargaining tool,” she said. “It gives you hope that it can possibly be done.”
