Dr. Scott Pedersen should be commended for his courage of conviction! I have never known any other individual so committed to free speech and higher education.

His dedication to students and his integrity make the biased, uneducated news staff of The Collegian appear like the immature hacks that they are.

This is evidenced by vilifying this professor with the one-sided “news reporting” of events during the Hobo Day parade (along with many misspellings and grammatical mistakes)!

What a disservice to readers lowering the standards of the university newspaper to a Facebook webpage blog.

What should have been reported was how anti-abortion organizations were allowed by the parade officials to blatantly circumvent the regulations, rules all parade participants were to follow.

Dr. Pedersen was working to ensure the parade regulations were being followed at the behest of other student organization groups involved in the parade who felt much disenfranchised by the parade officials’ endorsement of this one, politically volatile point of view.

By denying opposing views their say, the parade organizers and Vice President Rames, representing the university, were showing preferential treatment.

So much for diversity! Nothing short of an apology by Sarah French, Ms. Rames and the UPC is acceptable for their role in this fiasco.

We need new, well thought-out Hobo Day regulations now to ensure future parades reflect all the students’ spirit.

And as for The Collegian, I would encourage all its readers to wear black on Wednesdays to mourn its senseless murdering of innocent words.

Kelly A. Lehnertmicrobiology graduate student