Letters: Students’ philanthropy, fashion should be celebrated

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Missed opportunity in recycling story

While The Maine Campus is a wonderful student newspaper, I feel Monday’s article entitled “UMaine tests new recycling plan” (Feb. 1) betrayed truly great student work in favor of stylized reporting. The Campus, as a “by students for students” newspaper, should be vocal in its support for the efforts of its peers.

Unfortunately, this article focused on a “risk” of Facilities Management layoffs amongst recent events that saw multiple student organizations working together to try to save our great university tens of thousands of dollars annually. This was a missed opportunity to salute great extracurricular work, but the newspaper also could have supported the creation of more rewarding undergraduate part-time positions with this savings instead of resorting to scaremongering.

I thank the staff of The Maine Campus for reporting about student efforts towards sustainable progress. I hope, however, that the writing of our newspaper in the future allows the charitable contributions of students to their community to shine.

Sincerely,

Walter Lazarz, senior

University of Maine Green Team founder

Students should be free to express style

Lynnsay Maynard’s piece in Monday’s edition of The Maine Campus, “Leggings: What a feeling!” (Feb. 1) rubbed a few people the wrong way, including myself.

Perhaps it was because it ran mere weeks after an asinine opinion piece by Michael W. Gibson (“Women on UMaine campus need to change their clothes,” Jan. 14) on what women should wear — nothing too revealing or sexual, according to him.

While Maynard’s article was reasonably objective, she skewed on the critical side of leggings-wearers. This is a bit disconcerting. In an environment such as a college campus, no one should be made to feel as though they can’t express their identity through fashion.

It is OK to spend more than two seconds getting ready in the morning. It is OK to be comfortable enough with your body to reveal it as you see fit. The sea of gaucho-sized sweatpants tucked into Uggs knock-offs on campus should not discourage you from putting in some effort. I’m sure the swimming-in-sweatpants look expresses something, but I can’t think of what it is, other than sheer laziness.

Maynard’s less caustic and more even-keeled approach came on the heels of the aforementioned moralistic drivel by Gibson from an earlier issue. Gibson’s article had the audacity to spin women’s sexual empowerment as marketing their bodies as a product.

The point is no one should feel marginalized for communicating self-expression, confidence or sexuality in their clothing. At least they tried this morning. All I did was reach for yesterday’s jeans and a graphic tee when I stepped out of the shower.

Derek Francis, senior

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010, 2:15 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.