I share your sentiments, but I think they’re slightly misguided.

I agree on a lot of the points made - about how these kind of articles don’t represent the majority of students and negatively affect the student culture, making the debauchery in IV seem harmless and without serious consequence. I think the difference with the Igor column is that he actually has an amazing sense of humor. His article is the only funny thing in the Nexus.

I think the same criticism should be leveled at the sex columnist - and far more harshly. Not only are sexually active students a minority within the minority of party goers, the sex column does the most significant damage in affecting the minds of impressionable students. To top it all off, its not even funny. If we are talking about any serious form of Nexus self-censorship, we should first be looking at the anal sex articles. Just my opinion.

Miss Kuintzle, you are more than welcome to share your opinion according to our first amendment rights. Similarly, so is the Dear Igor Columnist. If you don’t like what he says, don’t read it.
Conservitarian, again, don’t like it don’t read it. And you can’t blame columnists for causing "damage in affecting the minds of impressionable students." You are assuming that students are not adults and cannot think for themselves. Maybe they go out and party, get drunk, and have sex because they like to do these things. What is said may not be funny to you, but it is funny to a lot of us, even a few who don’t admit it. Your problem was with the word self-censorship. What kind of Americans, what kind of college students would we be if we censored our newspaper because you don’t think it’s appropriate for columnists to speak their mind to adults who are 18 and over, with a few 17 year olds who are still out in the adult world of college?

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I understand the First Amendment and, unlike the left, actually value the Constitution (in its entirety). The federal government is not empowered to censor speech, so the Nexus can say whatever it wishes. But that doesn’t mean all speech is good for society or the people therein.

Friedrich von Hayek, the famous classical liberal economist and philosopher, once said, "Liberty and responsibility are inseparable." Having freedom carries the burden of using that freedom to do good. Liberty is temporal, as it is always struggling against the collectivist impulses of mankind. It must be preserved, and its preservation requires that free people do everything to resist those impulses.

Free citizens are capable of destroying their own society. They can vote for bigger government. They can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury, bankrupting their nation. They can abandon all standards of morality and lose their fear of God - God being the philosophical foundation of Natural Rights and therefore all of Western Civilization. Free people will remain free only as long as they allow themselves to be.

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
-Ronald Reagan

Culture is important. Values are important. Morality is important. They are all important because they help to define the type of political structure people establish over themselves. For that reason, self-censorship and self-restraint is not always a vice.

"What kind of Americans, what kind of college students would we be if we censored our newspaper because you don’t think it’s appropriate for columnists to speak their mind to adults who are 18 and over"

Columns should not be censored for content, but the method of delivery is universally self-censored by editors in the publishing world. The First Amendment allows both the government and editorial boards to censor obscenity. The Nexus either has bad editors or zero editors, because the printed columns regularly read like blog posts.

I also think the original author’s sentiments are slightly misguided. The Dear Igor column is clearly a comedy column, which makes it the wrong target for criticism. It is easy to simply avoid the comedy sections and the sex sections since they’re relatively self-contained.

But when the opinion editor writes a political column, and the best passages she can formulate are:

"Of course, Schwarzenegger’s spokesman swears up and down that it is just a “strange coincidence” that the first letters of each line combine to spell out “fuck you.” Yea, right."

"So I guess what I’m trying to say, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the entire California legislature, is fuck you"

that’s where the criticism should be directed. It’s a column with a message that should be considered and taken seriously, but the tone and delivery is adolescent and filled with needless profanity that serves no effect except to mock or shock. There are many subtle, resourceful ways of expressing the same sentiments using different words.