Collegiate Press Roundup 12-10-10

We present our regular review of selected student journalists and editors. This week, they assess the state of science education in America, the role of environmental activism on college campuses and the dismal world of congressional politics. 

1. A freshman writer for the Daily Princetonian isn’t surprised that China’s math and science students leave their American counterparts in the dust. But if we hope to catch up, she says, we will have to face down entrenched teachers’ unions, and not simply shell out more money as we’ve done in the past.
2. In the opinion of the science columnist at UNC Chapel Hill’s Daily Tar Heel, it might help if we did more to foster a greater appreciation of the sciences at the secondary level. Right now, that’s not the case.
3. At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the editors of the Daily Illini fret about the partisan obstructionism of the US Senate’s GOP minority.
4. At the same time, a fellow editorialist at Northern Arizona’s Daily Wildcat scores the Democrats for a pusillanimous capitulation on the Bush tax cut extension. 
5. A staffer for the University Daily Kansan finds local student activism and community efforts central to the urgent goal of making the world greener.
6. Combox exchanges are a source of fascination and repulsion for an observer at the Minnesota Daily: they seem to bring all sorts of primitive urges into play.
7. An op ed writer in the Syracuse Daily Orange thinks the sudden public longing for the presidency of George W. Bush is purely irrational nostalgia: the facts certainly don’t support the impulse, he says.
8. If the GOP were really serious about individual liberty and less governmental intrusion into private lives, says a writer for The Post at Ohio University, they’d stop supporting all of the regressive measures embraced by the social conservatives who just orchestrated the defeat of Proposition 19 in California.
9. Violent video games for children and young adolescents are very bad things, says a columnist for the University of Tulsa’s Collegian, and she hopes that the US Supreme Court will come to the same conclusion.
10. Even if animal rights activists have a valid point, the editors of UCLA’s Daily Bruin think that their tactics have really gone over the top this time.
11. Much as it pains him, a writer for CSU’s Rocky Mountain Collegian has to climb down and admit that he’s been wrong to oppose the DREAM Act now under scrutiny in Congress.
12. As they review the political developments of 2010 for their readers, the editors of the University of Florida’s Independent Alligator can’t find a whole lot to cheer about.