Old Hands

What’s that cat doing in the university corridor, semester after semester? Ask a returning student and you might hear that the cat is an old hand on campus too. A very old hand.

According to the story that circulates on campuses, some students failed so much, so much, that they ended up becoming animals. This explains, for those who tell the joke, why certain four-legged regulars seem to know the university better than the freshmen.

In some versions the transformation happens when students run out of time to finish their degree and lose their place at the university. At the Federal University of Paraíba, the former students are said to be the cats that roam the campus. At the Federal University of Goiás, one version identifies them with the monkeys on the Samambaia campus. There’s an irony to the sentence: those who never managed to graduate are still at university, in another shape, watching each new class come and go.

The story turns up on social media too. In 2023 a video showed a dog called Garrafa walking into a classroom at the Federal University of Goiás. The joke was that he had come to ask the lecturer a question. One commenter quoted in the news report recalled that the dogs at their own university were said to be engineering students who had spent more than ten years there without graduating. An ordinary moment gave people a fresh occasion to tell an old story.

There are campuses where they even talk about capybaras and lapwings. Who knows, if they are helped to complete their studies, they will be able to regain their human form.