Collegiate Press Roundup 4-8-10

We present our regular sampling of student journalists and editors, as they address various and sundry topics in their campus newspapers.  This week, our college press panels tackle smoking bans, unfairly gendered transit cards, sustainability, and the legalization of marijuana and ask national media figures to shut up about the Tea Party.

1. At the University of Michigan, President Mary Sue Coleman has instituted a campus-wide ban on smoking. One student’s reaction in The Michigan Daily can be found here.
2. Although Duke’s basketball team just won an NCAA championship, a columnist in The Chronicle assures everyone that campus-wide sustainability efforts are at the top of their game as well.
3. The editors of the Swarthmore College Phoenix endorse student activists protesting the regional transit authority’s “gender sticker” policies as “unfair to transgendered and queer persons."
4. A Kansas State Collegian staffer asks national opinion personalities such as Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann to please stop talking about “tea partiers.”
5. A writer at the University of Indiana, Bloomington’s Indiana Daily Student proposes a solution for the religiously motivated hate crimes he sees everywhere.
6. In The Daily Princetonian, an op-ed columnist declines an invitation to attach a pink triangle to his completed census form.
7. At the University of Oklahoma, one student writer in The Oklahoma Daily argues that de-criminalizing marijuana isn’t a good idea.
8. A Penn State journalism major in the Daily Collegian scores students’ addiction to cell phones, arguing that they’re sorely in need of some de-technologizing.