Collegiate Press Roundup 6-23-2010

We present our regular sampling of student journalists and editors, as they address various and sundry topics in their campus newspapers.  For this week, selected columnists take a look at the Obama administration’s education policies, the ways that their peers might spend the summer, the threat to free speech posed by self-censorship, fruitful arguments at the dinner table, and the futility of banning smoking everywhere on campus.

1. The editors of the Harvard Crimson offer some reflections on the state of American education at various levels and the likely impact of initiatives undertaken by the Obama administration.
2. In a collective op-ed, the staff of The Cornell Daily Sun assess the ongoing and intense debate at Cornell and elsewhere over the appropriate boundaries between campus anti-discrimination codes and freedom of speech and religious expression.
3. A writer for the University of Arizona’s Daily Wildcat offers constructive advice on how her classmates might spend their summer vacation.
4. On the same subject, an alternate scenario is presented by a columnist in The Diamondback at the University of Maryland.
5. The present governor of Arizona reminds a columnist at UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian of Alabama’s George Wallace back in his fire-eating segregationist days.
6. Incoming freshmen at George Washington University get some tips on coping with their three-day orientation session from a soon-to-be senior columnist in The Hatchet.
7. Dining with your peers is a splendid occasion for some contentious conversation, says a writer in the UCLA Daily Bruin.
8. The Arts editor of The Daily at the University of Washington advises readers to be very, very careful about the content of email messages sent via the school’s internet system. You can get into lots of trouble, she warns them.
9. An opinion blogger at the UI/Urbana-Champaign’s Daily Illini ponders the decision of her female peers to delay marriage.
10. At MIT, a staff columnist in The Tech argues that TV script writers, cartoonists and humorists around the world must cease their self-censorship in deference to Islamist sensibilities.  Free speech, he says, can only survive if it is exercised.
11. Boycotting BP gas stations is an admirable but misplaced response to the Gulf oil spill disaster, say the editors of The Minnesota Daily.
12. Although she finds cigarette smoke repellent and then some, an opinion writer in the U of M’s Michigan Daily thinks the university’s campus-wide ban on smoking is presumptuous and unenforceable.