“Rape culture produces harmful discussion of sexual assault cases”
By Alexandra Tashman

We see that insensitivity toward sexual violence pervades the most pedestrian conversations: People frequently use the word “rape” in conversation as a way to describe their academic performance, or even their success in a video game. By doing so they cast rape as a positive action and equate sexual assault with achievement.

As a society, the messages we send after an allegation of rape or sexual assault has been made, but before it is decided in court, are equally as important as the proceedings within the court itself.

One voice or one group should not dictate the conversation at the cost of the dignity or validity of another.

The Daily Bruin
The University of California, Los Angeles

Full article here.

“Stop it with the ‘Save the Planet’ nonsense”
By Jacob O’Gara

On campus this week, we’ve walked past our fellow students bicycling and face-painting their way to a sustainable future. Perhaps you joined them, hoping that your one small action will be the one small action that makes all the difference.

If there is anything demanding a wider consensus than there already is, this is it. Yet, obdurate holdouts remain: Climate change “skeptics” who pop up on occasion to cry alarmism or conspiracy and sound almost pro-pollution. It is a little frustrating when you’re on a burning ship and there are passengers who deny the flames. They engage in a supreme leap of faith that everything will work out just fine.

While one side trusts the planet to extinguish the fires we have started, the other prefers to assign that gig to us, confident that we all have what it takes to be in the savior business. This notion humankind has a grave duty to tend to Earth, as though we were garden caretakers, is solipsistic nonsense, the stuff of vainglorious delusion.

The Emerald
University of Oregon

Full article here.

“On the end of the semester”
By Sarah Burns

April is the worst, the Facebook statuses have declared. And they’re right.

“April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land,” T.S. Eliot writes in “The Waste Land.” “Mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.”

In Berkeleyland, April is indeed a time to mix memory and desire — the desire for good grades, the memory of too many nights spent “not-studying,” the futile, final sprint of the semester to make up for dull brain roots (stems?) with that one last cramming session.

And this — right now — this is the worst of it. Not the final stretch but the next-to-last one. It’s one last week of classes before they stop meeting, and all you have to worry about is the entire semester’s worth of material that you didn’t learn. At least that amount stops growing once dead week sets in.

The Daily Californian
The University of California, Berkeley

Full article here.