Collegiate Press Roundup

We present our weekly review of selected student editors and news analysts. For this week, they take on the private lives of public figures, wrongheaded tactics by Occupy Wall Street protestors, the awful spectacle of Black Friday and the cost of disbelief in evolution.

1. Although they’ve previously praised the Occupy Wall Street protests, the editors of the Stanford Daily think the movement’s latest attacks on capitalism are seriously wrong-headed and self-defeating.
2. A guest writer for the Michigan Daily explains that the problem is actually not capitalism, per se, but instead the corrupt “crony” variety that’s taken over Wall Street.
3. The recent statements on illegal immigrants by GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich have been praised as compassionate, but an editorial writer in the Daily Texan believes such policies would actually worsen the lives of most illegals.
4. At the Indiana Daily Student, a staff writer is really put off by the frantic, two-handed greed and materialism displayed by obnoxious Christmas shoppers on Black Friday. That’s also the view of the Iowa State Daily’s editors.
5. Obesity is indeed a growing medical problem in America, but a columnist for the Kentucky Kernal argues that we shouldn’t ostracize people who are struggling with it.
6. Why are Americans so obsessed with the private lives of public people, asks a columnist for the Daily Illini. It’s certainly baffling to many Europeans, she notes.
7. By contrast, a colleague at the U of Tulsa’s Daily Collegian thinks that Republican candidate Herman Cain needs to take sexual harassment charges directed at him far more seriously than he has thus far,
8. Some 40% of Americans do not believe in Darwinian evolution, and an opinion columnist for the Daily Utah Chronicle thinks that carries major political and medical consequences.
9. UNH already has a reputation as a party school, and the editors of The New Hampshire fear that student behavior at a recent concert won’t alter that image,
10. Although the president of Yale decided not to cancel the proposed Sex Week for 2012, the editors of the Daily News would like to know just what changes he has in mind for the program. Will he sacrifice free speech for the sake of public relations?
11. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the ideas underlying the Obama administration’s 2009 health care legislation, but a political analyst for the Daily Nebraskan thinks it was a major mistake to ram such a massive bill through Congress, rather than proceeding incrementally.
12. An atheist reflects on the approaching Christmas season for readers of the Miami Student.