Collegiate Press Roundup 4-16-10

We present our regular sampling of student journalists and editors, as they address various and sundry topics in their campus newspapers.  This week, our selection of opinion writers ranges broadly, covering student cell phone addiction, the evil of all-male student clubs and the possible connection between local weather patterns and student academic performance, among others.

1. Editors of the Daily Targum at Rutgers think that “text-speak” among student cell phone users has corrupted their ability to write and communicate.  Read their thoughts here.
2. An opinion columnist in the Brown Daily Herald explains why it was exactly right that former Harvard president Lawrence Summers got the gate five years ago.
3. A Harvard Crimson writer explains why bad weather in Cambridge makes the university’s students more successful than those in more temperate zones.
4. A Stanford Daily op-ed regular cheekily disputes the opinion of his east coast colleague noted above.
5. In the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily, an editorialist argues that entrenched racism is a major and unacknowledged fact of life in the Old Dominion state.
6. One of the guys at the Harvard Crimson holds that student clubs with exclusively male members are an affront to “gender justice,” and should be abolished.  Hopefully, we’ll soon get his take on the place of Wellesley, Bryn Mawr and Smith colleges, too.
7. In the Daily Nebraskan, a staff columnist scores the debasement of political discourse as a result of internet anonymity.
8. Writing in Colgate University’s Maroon-News, a graduating senior bemoans the selection of Professor Martha Nussbaum as his class commencement speaker. Another lecture by another professor!
9. In The Chronicle at Duke University, a senior staffer rounds off his stint at the paper by noting the intellectual insularity and uniformity of outlook that prevails among faculty and students on campus.
10. A guest editorialist in The Miscellany News at Vassar College protests that he’s often presumed guilty of complicity in social oppression on the basis of race and gender attributes that he’s stuck with.  Not fair, he says.