The Daily Reveille, LSU’s student-run newspaper, is my primary source for news about the state’s flagship university. It’s an extremely well-written, thoroughly investigated newspaper that employs budding journalists who know how to present a story with well-vetted sources. Sure, it’s not New York Times quality, but it definitely deserves to be in the top 10 college newspapers in the country—which it has been for several years now. They get exclusives that no one else can and are constantly updating their site with the latest news, sometimes even beating out all other Baton Rouge media outlets (except us, of course). It’s so good, in fact, that the Baton Rougean often links to articles they’ve published in our own reports.
It’s a fixture on campus, almost as much a part of our community as Mike or the campanile and almost as illustrious as our top-ranked Tigers. It accompanies me everyday as I walk campus, distracting me from the otherwise inane gossip of the other pedestrians and the intense walk that all engineers must endure to get to Patrick F. Taylor Hall.
But as awesome The Reveille is, it has one glaring flaw. Its one caveat—the Achilles’ Heal that just ruins the paper—is the opinion section. Filled with utterly vapid articles, the opinion section is routinely awful. When I read an opinion article, I want to be enlightened, challenged, debated, or just totally pissed off, but the only thing that The Reveille’s opinion section seems to do is make me angry. And not the good kind of angry that you want to be after an opinion article either; it’s more of a frustrated anger. The writing just isn’t becoming of an otherwise stellar paper.
I keep hoping, though, that I’ll be surprised. With the beginning of each new year, I hope that the new writers will be awesome and worthy of The Reveille’s name. But each year I’m disappointed. And what’s the worst is that sometimes the articles start off very well. Sometimes I get interested in what’s being said and read the whole thing. But every time the writer somehow seems to demolish any sort of intellectual thesis, in most of the times only within a paragraph or two!
To illustrate this, let me rehash the gist of some of my favorite columns. Last year, a black LSU student took a trip to another SEC school and was outraged by the racism that still persists in the South. OK, there’s not that much racism, more than other parts of America, sure, but I’ll stay with you because you can make a good social commentary about this, because it is an issue. Half way into the column, the student degenerates into a ranting and angry racist. He literally saves no face.
And then today, the editor of the opinion section published a piece calling on people in “real majors” to stop making fun of those in “inferior majors.” He starts off making good points about the uselessness of some basic humanities classes for people in engineering degrees and how each major operates within different domains, but then totally makes some ridiculous points all while totally missing some huge facts. For example, there really are some impractical degrees. You can’t ignore this fact. You also can’t even begin to assert that the importance of a foreign language degree is for worldwide communication. Seriously, that’s not even the issue. If you look at serious liberal arts schools, a majority of students double, even triple, major because, simply, those degrees are significantly less arduous. Engineers are so smug about their major precisely because it is so difficult and the work they’ve put into it is seemingly monumental compared to their classmates in the humanities and social sciences. Could you be more wrong?
It’s outrageous and I’ve had enough. I want to read a good article. From this day forward, I refuse to read any opinion article to avoid being frustrated anymore—they’ve finally pushed me over the edge.
