Hammock Debate in Full Swing at Michigan State

Hammock sales have skyrocketed in the past year, especially among college students. (Photo by Meg Stewart via Flickr)

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If, swept up in a wave of nostalgia about your own college days spent relaxing in a hammock while studying under twin birches, you packed your kid off to college at Michigan State University with a portable tree sling, you needn’t have bothered.

Concerned they might damage trees, MSU has nannied hammocks out of existence on the East Lansing campus, according to Watchdog.org.

Members of the Michigan State Hammocking Club aren’t exactly swaying gently into that good night.

They’ve established a petition on Change.org, asking the university to reconsider the ban and produce “empirical data” showing that hammocks are bad for trees.

Alex Valigura, a sophomore studying jazz performance and music education who is president of the university’s hammocking club, is rebel with a cause.

“It’s hammock at your own risk,” Valigura told the Wall Street Journal. “But I hammock pretty much every day.”

Sales of hammocks have rocketed exponentially into the stratosphere over the past year or so, especially among students, according to the global information company The NPD Group.

Last spring, 17 students at Kansas State University in Manhattan stacked 14 hammocks 30 feet between two trees, and K-State President Kirk Schulz proclaimed them “Overachievers!” in a tweet that went viral.

While hammock use apparently won the president’s seal of approval in Kansas, that’s not the case at Michigan State and some other schools.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill bans hammocks, a fact an embarrassed student learned after a branch of an American basswood cracked under the strain of his sling and sent him crashing to the ground.

And it’s not just trees that university officials across the country worry might buckle under the weight of students’ hammocks.

At the University of Central Arkansas, students were positioning their slings among Corinthian columns around a prominent fountain on the Conway campus. University officials, concerned the hammocks might damage the stately columns, steered students toward two “hammock farms” — groupings of wooden posts that hold as many as nine hammocks.

At Michigan State, where the entire campus is an arboretum with 21,653 cataloged trees, officials say repeatedly tying and untying straps in popular spots on the campus can erode bark and expose the sensitive layer beneath, threatening the tree’s health, according to a story on the university’s website.

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• Do hammock bans go too far?

Frank Telewski, a Michigan State plant biology professor and curator of the campus arboretum, said hammocking isn’t the only activity that damages trees — parking under shade trees is verboten, too, because heavy vehicles may damage trees’ root system.

“The MSU staff who care for the campus trees are not targeting any one specific activity, but are enforcing a policy that has been implemented for decades to protect the campus trees,” Telewski told MSU. “It is one of the many reasons we are known and treasured for our beautiful, verdant campus of healthy trees.”

In a letter to Michigan State officials on the university’s Odyssey social media platform, sophomore Victoria Blust pleaded for a reversal of the ban, saying that in their effort to save trees, they destroyed a community. There are so many trees on the campus, she claimed, that no two are over-used.

“There are no words to describe the love I have for my hammock,” she wrote. “If you have never experienced hammocking before, then you probably think I sound insane. But for those of you who have been blessed enough to relax under the trees, then you know where I’m coming from. Michigan State has banned hammocking on campus. But what they don’t realize is that they didn’t just get rid of little pieces of fabric that hang between trees, they got rid of a community, a stress reliever and a big part of a lot of our lives.”