This is a great piece from today's Dartmouth, about two Dartmouth alums who are on opposite ends of the pornography spectrum.

Vivid Entertainment [Warning:NSFW], which is the world's largest pornography distributor and is often referred to as the Microsoft of the porn industry, has spearheaded the movement toward increasing pornography's social acceptability.

Which Boston-area university nabbed the best commencement speaker?

• Boston University: CBS head honcho (and Howard Stern nemesis) Leslie Moonves
• Boston College: Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a/k/a George Bush's BFF / bathroom supervisor
• Tufts University: Cycling superhero Lance Armstrong

Condoleeza Rice will speak at BC's commencement on May 22.

Also:

On this "Day Without Immigrants," the Heights editorial staff encouraged BC students to boycott class in an effort to show solidarity with immigrants --- because "missing a day of class is not going to cost anyone a job or gravely hurt anyone's family."

In their fight against global warming, MassPIRG's student chapters just brought the ultimate competitor into their corner --- MTV. For one moment, MTV execs wrestled themselves away from weighty concerns such as Date My Mom, Parental Control, and Yo Momma, to launch the "Break the Addiction" campaign on their Web site last Sunday.

Last year, Security on Campus, Inc. (a national organization), and the Cambridge-based Student-Alumni Committee on Institutional Security Policy (a/k/a StalCommPol) joined forces to promote legislation that would require private universities (like Harvard, or MIT) to provide access to detailed and complete crime incident reports.

Here's a press release from Operation: Over, about that organization's brief occupation last week of BU president Robert Brown's office:

Here's a sampling of the issues tackled at Sunday's regional conference of the newly revitalized Students for a Democratic Society, according to coverage in the Brown Daily Herald:

• War in Iraq
• Business interests connected with the war in Iraq
• Poverty
• Immigrant rights
• Rising higher-ed tuition

From today's papers:

Dreadlocked hippie apprehended at Harvard.

GLBT tolerance proceeding slowly at BC. (Mike Miliard wrote about this issue for the Phoenix last year [and won an award for his coverage, to boot]. For some reason I can't get the page to load for a link. Sorry.)

The Northeastern Patriot is getting its fair share of publicity press

I'm not sure how many students in Boston will be affected by new federal regulations that "prohibit Section 8 assistance to any student who is under the age of 24, unmarried, without a dependent child, not a veteran, and not income-eligible," according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Students' parents' income will be considered.

There's only one candidate in the running to be the next president of BU's Student Union (a loud-and-clear statement about how little the student body cares about its government, which has been wracked by impotence and in-fighting for years). But even when nobody runs, scandal still rears its head.

Last week, the Free Press reported that the candidate, 20-year-old Brooke Feldman, was caught posing with alcohol in Facebook photos:

I think this is interesting:

"Brown recently joined a growing number of medical and nursing schools — including the University of Michigan, University of Texas and the UCLA School of Medicine — that require students to buy and use PDAs. Faculty and students say the technology saves time and helps them provide better care, in addition to reducing medical errors.