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The New York Times’ new columnist is a 29-year-old conservative named Ross Douthat. Ross was a columnist for the Harvard Crimson and a staffer (eventually editor) for the conservative Harvard Salient as an undergrad in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and Campus Progress has dug up some of his more … pungent writing. Here’s a taste, from an April 2001 Crimson column:
“If I really wanted to offend Harvard Asians, I might sit down and write an article in which I was, well, a tad critical of the Asian community. For instance, I might suggest that there was, let’s say, a slight trend toward ethnic self-segregation, or a slight proclivity for the sciences over the humanities among Asian-Americans. And I might, if I were so inclined (not that anyone would be), get downright nasty and suggest that a large chunk of these self-segregated, math-and-science types are self-absorbed, clannish and downright weird.”
Check out the whole rundown here.
Kristen Juras, an assistant professor of law at the University of Montana, doesn’t approve of a sex column that runs in the school’s student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin.
The column, Juras says, is “embarrassingly unprofessional,” and “affects my reputation as a member of the faculty.” She wants the student government’s publications board to create written content guidelines that would ban such material. If they don’t, she intends to take her case to the university’s board of trustees — and, if necessary, the state legislature.
Juras, whose son attends UM, has also sent a letter to the university’s president and the dean of its journalism school asking them to meet with the Kaimin editorial board and ask them to drop the column.
Kaimin editor Bill Oram has no intention of backing down. “We welcome the fight,” he says. “We feel we have a right and a duty to publish potentially controversial material.”
“The Bess Sex Column” has appeared weekly since late January. Its five installments to date can be found here.
March 17 Update: Follow-up post here.
Quick updates on a bunch of stories we’ve been following…
- The University of North Carolina has become the twenty-first US campus to dump Russell Athletic in response to labor violations.
- A three-part analysis of the Power Shift 2009 conference: Background, Tactics, and The Future.
- A hundred NYU grad students held a “work-in” at Bobst Library yesterday afternoon.
- The economic crisis is leading students to transfer to cheaper colleges.
- Hillary Clinton has announced a million-dollar scholarship program for Palestinian students.
- President Obama will be providing major new details of his education plan at a speech this morning.
Saturday’s edition of the Eugene, Oregon Register Guard had a great, lengthy editorial on the Oregon Daily Emerald student newspaper strike. Here’s a taste:
Members of the Emerald’s news staff are student journalists, but they’re more than that — they’re journalists, period. The Emerald is not a practice field or a plaything. It’s a real newspaper where people gather, edit and report the news under daily deadline stress and intensifying economic pressures.
[…]
The Emerald still must find a way to break even or better financially. In that respect it faces the same challenges as other newspapers, large and small. The Emerald must find a way to survive, but its long-term prospects have been improved. They’ve improved because the newspaper’s editors, reporters and photographers have ensured that survival will be worth fighting for.
The student staffers at the Oregon Daily Emerald have ended their strike after winning three of their four demands. They will be entering into mediation with their board of directors next week to resolve the remaining issues.
As the Emerald staff noted on their blog, thirty-three student newspapers across the nation have published a joint editorial in solidarity with the strikers.
studentactivism.net 
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