We present our regular review of selected student journalists and editors. This week, they write about professor-student friendships, campus smoking bans, Christian holiday paranoia and crabby feminists.
- A regular columnist for the Yale Daily News offers some thoughts on Oklahoma’s misguided and xenophobic attempts to ban shari’a law in the state.
- Reflecting on recent political developments, the editors of the Georgetown Voice think that President Obama’s tax deal with the GOP will cost him big time if the economy continues to flounder.
- A staffer for the Emory Wheel describes a crashingly boring, educationally useless lecture course, which he thinks are all too common on campus. Surely, there’s gotta be a way of evaluating the useless professors teaching such courses, especially in view of Emory’s hefty tuition. If tenure means we’re stuck with ‘em, with accurate evaluations we can at least avoid ‘em.
- With the holiday season approaching, an op ed writer for The Daily Iowan thinks that Christians need to get over their persecution complex.
- On the other hand, a colleague at the Temple News rebuffs local PC police gone silly in response to a familiar Philadelphia Christmas event. Really, it’s OK to call it “Christmas.”
- Will Congress please quit stalling and pass the DREAM act? It’s downright un-American, says a regular for the Stanford Daily.
- Getting to know your professors outside of the formal classroom setting can be a very productive thing, says a history major in the Brown Daily Herald. But the nuances can be positively squirmy, especially in light of the obvious power/status imbalance between mentors and mentees.
- At the University of Delaware, the editors of The Review acknowledge that there’s a lot to weigh in deciding whether or not to publish classified Wikileaks diplomatic cables as the New York Times did. But they have no doubt that Wikileaks editor Julian Assange was dead wrong to leak them in the first place.
- A self-designated feminist writer for The Parthenon at Marshall University concludes that you don’t have to be caustic, shrill and unpleasant, as many of her “sisters” unfortunately are.
- There’s an alarming spike in hate crimes on the Wisconsin system’s six campuses, says a columnist for the UW/Madison Daily Cardinal. The reason for this? Not enough mandatory tolerance/diversity courses for a sizable student cohort that hails mainly from provincial small towns.
- A news item from South Dakota State’s Collegian details how some students are really fuming about the school’s proposed smoking ban.
- The editors of the Middlebury Campus reflect on the school’s new gender neutral housing policy, and the less-than-perfect process through which it was devised.
