I was just emptying my dad's locker (moving him to a nursing home), and I discovered a Nikon SLR camera and lens kit that was about 32 years old. I remember when my dad bought it, and I think he used it once....maybe twice. Anyway, I threw it up on craigslist, hoping a collector might put it to good use and throw me a few bucks.

I ended up selling it to a photographer who was buying it for his niece. We got to chatting, and he told me that her beginning photography classes won't teach on digital cameras. Now it isn't for privacy reasons, but rather so the students are forced to learn all of the underlying photography principals and techniques.

I thought that was pretty cool.

Anyway, this is a very long winded way of saying I think this is a good idea. Let them workshop, experiment, and learn the fundamentals before entering the 24 hour news cycle.

Perhaps, if universities established well delineated editorial rules (although, one would imagine they had some guidelines) and university student papers' faculty advisors had the power to nix racist or other offensive Op-Eds, fewer offensive Op-Eds that have little to no merit would be published. But then there's that annoying thing called "Free Speech." *Hmmm. What to do*

"Newly aware of life's injustices"

What the fuck, how can you make it to age ten without knowing this stuff?

Also, why bother? We all have unfettered ability to publish on the internet.

But Dan, please take the lead, and stop criticizing the mistakes of college students. That might put you into a bind with some people, who've made mistakes that offend you personally. Would you really call for a pass for a student who wrote an sucks staying there are only maybe 12 "decent" gay men?

Good point unpaid reader. White privilege is so pervasive, one doesn't even question it. It is the very essence of our self perception. Like men are the first sex, whites are the first race.
In Australia we are surrounded by a multitude of races and the original land owners are black. How Australian Aborigines have been treated by whites over these two hundred years, arrogant and evil. Killing the people of cultures who had lived with the land for millions of years.

I agree re absence of music to go with this momentous time. These kids need musical collaboration. Maybe Taylor will come to their aid. Sing songs about white privilege.

The student's beliefs don't seem all that different from the majority of political leaders in Seattle. I'm pretty sure that student could win a seat on the City Council.

Wouldn't the better solution be reintroducing pen names for writing at the high school and collegiate newspaper levels?

The institutions would know who exactly wrote what in their publications, so reasonable levels of accountability could be enforced and procedures for confirming authorship could be established for writing sample for other academic or career purposes as well.

There is a long standing tradition already, and it's not like everyone else on the Internet is posting under their government names; why try to implement a weak technological solution to something already "solved"?

Dan, this is Jim Reische. I'm glad you read my Times piece (longtime fan, first-time caller!), and I completely agree with you. Years ago I chaired the board that supervises the University of Michigan's student paper, the Michigan Daily. Later I served as an informal advisor/coach/therapist to student newspapers at the other schools where I worked--mostly liberal arts colleges. In every case, we struggled with the consequences of allowing unsupervised "student journalists" (irony alert) to publish online. Student journalists whose reach had once been more or less limited to campus were now experimenting with ideas (and stretching the limits of factuality) in a globally visible medium, which looks to outside readers every bit as legit as HuffPo, etc. (the public's superficial media literacy is also to blame here, but that's a story for another day). I'm seeing administrators and faculty go through a weekly spasm of running around trying to figure out what truthiness the paper will print next. And then the Breitbart folks sit out there and pick this stuff off to make an example out of people. Every once in a while I run into student editors and reporters who really care, and work hard to get things right. We've got a few here at Williams right now. But they're too much the exception. As you suggest, I don't think we should blame the kids. It's us grownups who put these tools in their hands, and who then backed off when they told us they didn't want an advisor because that would limit their editorial freedom. Student newspapers can be a great thing, if their limits are recognized and appreciated. Right now they're not, and the result is a big problem that no one has the nerve to take on, because who wants to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel (or in this case, get their pixels for free!).

@7 is it common in australia to consider aborigines "Black"? I've definitely wondered about the genetic connection between native australians and their african forebearers, as there are some uncanny physical resemblances (that are not shared with mainland asians) but you can be fooled (for eg, "Aryan" is a racial term for a people native to India, rather than the tall, blond-hair blue-eyed vision of today)

@10 we all can choose to have pen names on the internet. I do not believe it serves to help the discourse.

"I hate people of X racial group and they should not exist" is not a mistake anyone should still be making as a young adult. That's Nazi ideology.

@5 "an essay". oof.

:/ Apparently this is the new norm for commenting.

@10 - "pen names" have always sheltered trolls, and trolls are way too prominent on the internet already. So no, I don't think pen names are the answer here. But perhaps mandatory fact checking would be good. If you assert that something is true, putting it through an independent fact checking process might reduce gross generalizations and ignorant meme-repetition.

@12 - There is no genetic basis for any racial group. Genes traces kin groups, which are real. Races are made-up things and the definitions vary a lot from country to country.

So yes, you can be Black and an Australian Aboriginal person in Australia. Or Black and South Asian if you're in Britain or South Africa. Those groups of people have had no common genetic connection with each other or with dark skinned Sub-Saharan Africans for a very, very long time, and are only distantly related genetically - but they can all be Black, since it's a made-up grouping with no biological basis.

A correction to @17, dark skinned South Asians are not Black in South Africa, they are Coloured. But they are often Black in Britain.

Racial categories are confusing, because they are artificial and arbitrary. In the Dominican Republic, if you look like a lot of your ancestors were "White", you are "White". In the U.S., if you look like any of your ancestors were "Black", you are "Black". Because of these different definitions, many citizens of the Dominican Republic automatically change their race when they travel between the two countries. They are White when at home, and Black when they visit the U.S..

A White Dominican friend was quite startled the first time he visited New York and discovered that he was suddenly Black. It was a very educational experience for him.

@17 No American would ever refer to an australian aboriginee as black, however - that's reserved for people of African descent (and not in the we're-all-from-africa manner). Is it common in Australia to say that? The other question - in the great lineage of people, in which the ancestors of central asian peoples are also the ancestors of native americans; that Chinese and Korean and Japanese people all share a common ancenstor that Europeans do not, etc: Did the aborinal ancestors arrive directly, more or less, from Africa, or are they descendants of groups that had long settled southeast asian and malay?

Comments gone missing. In case they return, correction above. Fancifully I added a few yrs; Aboriginal Australians have occupied this land 40-60 thousand yrs.

Sportlandia, Aborigines call themselves Blackfellas.

@11 in your closing, are you saying people are afraid to pick a fight with student newspapers, or with whom?

I don't see that at all. I see people very happy to hate on student newspapers, and then student newspapers hunker down and ratchet up. The corrosive extremists are happy with yelling ast each other.

Dan's suggestion makes sense, and it's silly when someone responds that it won't make the problems go away entirely. It would shift the mechanics and shift behavior somewhat.

With opinion pieces, this definitely makes sense. But some campus newspapers, especially at large schools with journalism departments, actually produce significant journalism that's of interest to the wider public. These stories still need to be posted online.

@13 - good to see you again man.

@13 Yeah, I agree. The Texas State University student was engaging in hate speech, and the publication should have refused to publish a piece calling for the bizarre and hateful notion of ethnic cleansing.

I also agree with Dan's point, that limiting student publications to print distributed on campus would be a sensible and wise policy, given the lamentable tendency of the young to express themselves immaturely. Alas, the genie is out of the bottle on that, and I do not see a credible way to make such a policy change at anything like a plurality of colleges and universities.

@22, Yes, I'm saying administrators (myself included) have been hesitant to propose that student newspapers get experienced advisors.

Note that I'm not saying student reporting should be subject to administration review. It shouldn't. But they should be taught good journalistic practice, including research skills, writing and ethics, and then be answerable to their readers and the campus they supposedly serve for the quality, accuracy, and objectivity of their work.

Publishing on the web makes it even harder to be tolerant of mistakes made in the learning process, which I believe is part of Dan's point and certainly of mine. Imagine a first-term college freshman writing about campus sexual assault: The decision to publish their work on the web makes it awfully hard for anyone to tolerate even their most honest and innocent learning mistakes. Yet our schools routinely let students report such stories without guidance, and then we blame them later if/when they don't get it right. And then we let them do it again. And again. It's the definition of insanity, and even students are starting to recognize that it's not a valuable learning experience: many college newspapers are now having a hard time attracting reporters and editors.

And @23, I agree: campus papers at large schools have access to journalism departments and experienced advisers, and are taught good practices. The result is "significant journalism that's of interest to the wider public," in your nice phrase. When the Ann Arbor News went out of business a few years back, it was the student-run Michigan Daily that stepped in to fill the void. Unfortunately, from my experience liberal arts colleges don't have the program or people needed to make this model work.