See what newspapers around the country think about this week’s news

Nativist zealots warp American justice

Several years ago, a new kind of vigilante group emerged on the national scene, conducting armed patrols of the Arizona border to search for illegal immigrants. Like those people that they seek to bar from this country, they have moved north.

The Minutemen have made the trek to Iowa. The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps is one of two conservative anti-immigration groups whose members refer to themselves as Minutemen. The controversial organization, whose goal – according to its website – is to assist law enforcement in the apprehension of illegal aliens, has 10 chapters in Iowa, including one in Johnson County. As of yet, the organization has succeeded only in bringing ethnic tension to new heights.

The Minuteman Corps maintains that it is a peaceful and patriotic organization. Craig Halverson, the Minuteman Corps’ Iowa director, was adamant in denying that the organization is bigoted…

Frequent reports of its bigoted behavior paint a much different picture from that of the organization’s website. The Minuteman Corps attempts to hide its intolerance behind the American flag, but the Minutemen are not patriots. Anyone truly in search of a way to help America would do well to remember the melting pot that founded it – something the Minuteman Corps has clearly forgotten.

-University of Iowa’s Daily Iowan

Affirmative subtraction

American society seems to revolve around classifying itself – by race, class, gender, behavior; The list goes on. Given the infinite number of factors that affect each and every person’s life, as well as the fact that Americans have the right to choose which box they check, we’re not quite sure what’s achieved by quantifying statistics as the Education Department has done.

A culture that forces individuals to identify with clearly defined groups may actually rob people of their personal and societal identity. And further classifying, quantifying and analyzing those arbitrarily defined standards may hinder progress by creating fixed, meaningless identities that could start to rub off on people, or at least make them feel as if they should, ironically, classify themselves. Put simply, this is the reality behind self-fulfilling stereotypes.

-University of Texas’ Daily Texan

A laudable battle

For all our devotion to the values of academia, we hardly study the war in Iraq and its ramifications. … Yet if pacifists renounce the study of war, they surrender expertise to its natural adherents: the hawks and perpetual gladiators who cannot imagine a world without conflict and will not prepare the world for peace. The university will have capitulated to the think-tank.

Nor is the study of war a small and specialized field best left to the military academies. It goes far beyond mere tactics and covers a broad swath of knowledge that touches many conventional disciplines from political science and international relations to economics, sociology, anthropology, and public policy.

Harvard has a handful of war scholars and courses directly related to the subject. But the topic is so vast and important to our nation’s immediate and long-term future that we believe Harvard – and academia at large – should devote more resources to its study and teaching. Otherwise, the University will have abdicated an important part of its mission – to educate wise and informed citizens.

-Harvard University’s Daily Crimson

OPINIONS BOARD: Editorials are determined by the Wildcat opinions board and written by one of its members. They are Justyn Dillingham, Allison Hornick, Sarah Keeler, Connor Mendenhall, Jerry Simmons and Allison Dumka.