Toward the end of the school year, as students' eyes start to glaze over in class and their free time gets buried in procrastination-delayed group projects, letters to the editor slow to a trickle in our inbox.
Since we spend much of our days in the basement of The State Press office, we don't get much other contact with the outside world, so we start to get really lonely. We start thinking about ways we can get people to talk to us again. And we always end up deciding we should resort to the world's oldest, most talked about subject.
We're talking about sex.
Yes, believe it or not, when we write articles about college students and sex, we're not trying to inform the public about safe sex or about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases.
We're actually sitting in the basement in gleeful anticipation of the angry father. You know, the one who lost sight of his kid for two seconds while standing in line at Starbucks. The kid tragically picked up a copy of our paper, and upon sight of the word "sex" went into a frantic hump-a-thon with everything in sight.
When we ask students to vote for their favorite place to get it on around campus, we're not presenting a light-hearted category in the entertainment section of our paper.
We're actually lowering our journalistic standard to an abominable level, to the pits of muck and grime enjoyed by such disgusting publications as Cosmopolitan and Maxim.
Never mind that the front page featured articles on issues involving student loans. These articles talked about things that were so unimportant that they could only influence the entire future of higher education in the United States and its accessibility.
We know that wasn't important, though, because we've gotten many more letters about the fact that students voted the library as the best place to have sex on campus than we'll ever get about student loans or federal legislation that impacts us all.
We don't want to discourage our readers from writing to us - even if it's to call us a trashy rag. What we might encourage, however, is writing to us about things we (and hopefully you) take way more seriously.
