Boy, don't we long for those bygone days when college students got in trouble for swallowing goldfish, conducting panty raids and cramming too many people into a phone booth? Or even for those later days when they wreaked havoc by taking over university buildings, battling with ROTC recruiters and rioting at Dead concerts?
Well here's a story on
Jim Romenekso's site about another college journalist running amok and raising hell, this time by writing a column
in the North Carolina Daily Tar Heel calling for, among others things, "all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport."
Not surprisingly, she was fired after that piece of nuanced political commentary with the paper's opinion editor explaining she was canned not for her views, but for
misleading her sources.Now every year, a few overzealous college paper pundits get cashiered for writing things that reflect the reality that some of their ilk are immature, uninformed, and far too eager to get noticed on campus. If Ms. Bandes's real sin was voicing bigoted and child-like opinions, the appropriate response is not to fire her, but to make her stick around, absorb the backlash she has generated and come to grips with her own shortcomings and the power of words. (Or, she may just be a ambitious young attack dog auditioning to be
Ann Coulter's understudy.)
If in fact, as the opinion editor contends, she doesn't know the difference between
an honest interview and the complete manipulation of her sources, then please, please, please -- let's get some faculty or media advisors in a room with these budding Maureen Dowds and Michael Kinsleys to teach them a few fundamentals of fair and decent journalism before they start racking up the bylines