By Tim Sanders

On Jan. 28, 2008, the CollegeDegree.com web site listed the Top 25 Strangest College Courses. Here are some of my favorites from that list:

1. The Art of Walking - Kentucky’s Centre College.

2. The American Vacation - University of Iowa.

3. Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles - University of Wisconsin.

4. Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism - Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College (The Peace Studies Department).

5. Philosophy and Star Trek - Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
6. Learning from YouTube - California’s Pitzer College.

7. The Phallus - Occidental College in Los Angeles.

8. Queer Musicology - UCLA.

You can’t make stuff like that up. And if those aren’t enough to make you consider sending your 18-year-old to technical school and saving a bundle of cash, there’s another college course which for some odd reason did not make the list. It is taught at the graduate level in the School of Education and Counseling at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and is called ... ready for this? ... ECOPSYCHOLOGY.

I read about this course in a February 16 article by Gabrielle Glaser in The New York Times. In her article, Ms. Glaser explains that swarms of people are now consumed with anxiety about global warming and the planet’s health. Many of those afflicted with these worries, in fact, need serious, in-depth psychological counseling. She says that "more than 120 therapists from Alaska to Uruguay are listed as practitioners at the International Community for Ecopsychology Web site, and colleges in the United States and Europe offer courses in the field."

The author then says that Dr. Thomas Doherty, who teaches a graduate course in ecopsychology at Lewis and Clark College, "advises clients with global warming anxiety to recognize their concern about climate change and accept the limits of what they can control. He recommends ‘fasts’ from shopping, the news and sending e-mail, while cultivating calmer pursuits like meditation or gardening."

Ms. Glaser does not indicate what kind of hypersensitive souls tend to suffer from advanced "global warming anxiety," but my guess would be that they have a whole lot of time on their hands and no real personal problems to worry themselves about. Or they may just be graduate students. You know, psychologists or counselors in the making.

"Since she took Dr. Doherty’s ecopsychology class last fall, Angeline Tiamson, a graduate student earning a master’s degree in counseling at Lewis & Clark, has embarked on a new way of thinking. When she is on campus, she drifts to the low, wide trunk of an old black walnut tree, a spot she found during a nature exercise for class. She sits there for several minutes: no iPod, no cell phone, no laptop. She rubs her hand over the bark, and sniffs the empty shells left behind by squirrels." I’ll bet Mom and Dad will be tickled to learn that their education dollars haven’t been wasted.

When I was in graduate school at Auburn, back during the Harrison administration (Benjamin, not William Henry), I was forced to take a lot of psychology courses. I think it was punishment for a low GPA in undergraduate school (where I majored in beer). Psychology in those days was all about a therapeutic tool called "reflection." All the great psychologists, including Freud, Jung, and Newhart, had used it. It was very effective, and it went something like this:

PATIENT: "Doctor, I feel so forlorn that I could actually jump out that eighth story window behind your desk!"

PSYCHOLOGIST (reflecting): "I hear you saying that you feel so forlorn that you could actually jump out this eighth story window behind my desk."

PATIENT: "Or I could just throw YOUR boney ass out that window!"

PSYCHOLOGIST (reflecting): "Or you could throw MY boney ass out the window. I think we’re making some real prog–[CRASH]–AIIIIYEEEEE!!!"

PATIENT: "I feel much better now."

That is mostly what I remember about those psychology classes. That and this little story, which is absolutely true:

I had a friend–let’s call her Innocent Iris–who was dating a young man working on his doctorate in psychology. Let’s call him Almost Dr. Denton. One day at lunch Iris told me she had a problem.

Her problem was that she was considering marrying Denton, the aspiring psychologist with a golden future before him. He was intelligent, understanding, good looking, and very sensitive. He was perfect, in fact, except for one minor idiosyncracy.

He wore women’s underwear.

By which she didn’t mean he wore them on his head as a party trick, or only when all of his boxers were in the clothes hamper, but all the time. So far it was only panties–the lacy kind–and pantyhose. Almost Dr. Denton told Iris that there was something therapeutic about the way they felt. And since Innocent Iris and Almost Dr. Denton were almost engaged, he’d asked her to pick up a few things for him at J.C. Penny’s, which carried an excellent line of ladies’ undergarments, but employed a clerk who always eyed him suspiciously when he browsed the lingerie department. Iris said she could live with the underwear thing, as long as that was all there was to it. But what if this was only the beginning? She said Almost Dr. Denton seemed very fascinated by a pair of patent leather high-heeled boots she wore. What did it all mean? Did she dare take him home to meet her parents? Would her mom’s garter belts and hosiery all turn up missing when they left?

I had no answers for her; I couldn’t even reflect. We hadn’t covered anything like that in my classes. I graduated in a few weeks, and never knew if Iris and Denton ever decided to share their underwear until death did them part or not.

What I do know is that by now Almost Dr. Denton is Almost Certainly Dr. Denton.

And if he isn’t sitting behind a desk somewhere, adjusting his Victoria’s Secret thong while advising some poor boob to deal with his Global Warming Anxiety Syndrome by sniffing empty walnut shells, he may well be teaching that new course called "The Art of Walking in Pantyhose" to a roomful of college boys at your old alma mater.