We present our weekly review of selected student editors and news analysts. In today’s edition, they urge students to be proactive in changing entrenched campus cultural norms, defend the need to monitor mosques more closely, argue against recruiting academically weak athletes and offer some suggestions on how to spend your time between now and the approaching Apocalypse.
1) With plans underway for Yale’s Sex Week 2012, a columnist for the Daily News discusses the event’s significance on a college campus. Some lively comments follow.
2) Along similar lines, a colleague at the MSU Reflector explains why the regular sex column she’ll be writing is so urgently needed.
3) Following the exhaustively-covered GOP presidential caucuses, a political analyst for the Iowa State Daily describes her own participation amid a field of unappealing candidates.
4) As a university, Tulane was once committed to the status quo of institutional racial segregation. That’s long gone, but a columnist for the Tulane Hullaballoo thinks that there’s a lot about the present state of things that the university needs to let go of, as it did segregation.
5) Similarly, an op ed writer for the Columbia Daily Spectator laments an institutional culture of inert complacency, and he’d like to see a revival of the activist spirit of the student uprisings of 1968. It can happen, he thinks, if students take the lead.
6) Ever since the terrorist attacks in September, 2001, there has been heightened scrutiny of American Muslim communities, especially mosques suspected of harboring extremists. That’s unfortunate, but an op ed writer for the Maine Campus thinks it’s entirely justified.
7) With the apocalypse forecast for the end of 2012 – at least according to the Mayan calendar cycle – a columnist for the Tufts observer details how she might spend the remaining time before the end.
8) Following a conversation with an Australian friend, a regular for the Michigan Daily seeks to find the appropriate curricular balance between vocational advantage and intellectual enhancement.
9) A political commentator for the UNV Sagebrush takes a look at Newt Gingrich and other GOP presidential hopefuls. If this is their varsity, he says, look for President Obama to coast in 2012.
10) The editors of The Dartmouth note that while the college has been recruiting academically weak athletes in recent years, Dartmouth squads have been getting pounded in Ivy League competition. It would be nice to bring home some athletic laurels, they agree, but not at the expense of academic standards for everyone, including athletes.
11) Recently mandated federal guidelines for prosecuting sexual assault cases on college campuses have some merits, but an opinion columnist for the UNC/Chapel Hill Daily Tar Heel also sees some major problems, especially for the accused.
12) Christian believers have wrestled with some thorny theological puzzles from the outset, especially the path believers must take to God. But a writer for the Daily Utah Chronicle thinks that a contemporary icon of popular culture can provide the answers that they’ve been seeking over the long centuries.
