Collegiate Press Roundup 6-3-10

We present our regular sampling of student journalists and editors, as they address various and sundry topics in their campus newspapers.  This week, senior reflections, Teach for America, the line between the offensive and the satirical, griping about reverse racism and the new health care law are in the crosshairs.

1. A departing senior assesses her undergraduate years in a final piece for the Harvard Crimson.
2. Controversy erupts in the Indiana University Daily Student, following the English Department chairman’s decision to reduce the number of A grades awarded in a composition class.
3. An op-ed writer in the Iowa State Daily describes the difficulties of maintaining romantic connections at home after his military deployment to Iraq. Several commenters are strongly sympathetic.
4. Writing in The Observer, a Tufts University journalist argues that Teach for America, which attracts so many of his peers, isn’t everything that it’s supposed to be.
5. At Pennsylvania’s Millersville University, the editors of The Snapper evaluate the state of the professoriate at their school, and make some recommendations.
6. A self-proclaimed secularist writing in the University of South Carolina’s Daily Gamecock denounces Draw Muhammad Day as simple religious bigotry.
7. In the same vein, a writer in the Daily Utah Chronicle laments the self-censorship imposed earlier by Comedy Central on South Park, following terrorist threats to the show and the sponsoring network.
8. In Illinois, a Daily Northwestern columnist takes a look at the increasingly competitive political race for President Barack Obama’s former seat in the U.S. Senate.
9. The editors of West Virginia University’s Daily Athenaeum conclude that “gringo masks” satirizing supporters of Arizona’s controversial immigration law do not manifest reverse racism.  It all depends, they argue, on who holds positions of dominance and power.
10. Class attendance at the University of Washington, Seattle is your choice, notes a writer in The Daily, but the consequences of absence are also your responsibility.
11. At James Madison University, a staffer for The Breeze announces a settlement between his newspaper and the Virginia Commonwealth Attorney’s office.  The stand-off arose following the police seizure of nearly 1000 photographs from the paper’s editorial offices without a search warrant.
12. At the University of Dallas, an op-ed writer in The University News takes the measure of the Obama administration’s health care law.