Well, I seem to be in the minority... but I think two things add a little more weight to the notability of the incident:
The fact that PSU was specifically noted for its support of VT (in fact, there's a picture of it directly to the left of the section we're discussing).
The (rather bizzare) fact that the students quite vehemently refuse to apologize for it. In fact, if you read the article, I didn't even pull out the most offensive quotes. As a side note, this is also why I'm not particularly concerned about this "haunting them for the rest of their lives".
But that's just my reasoning... my life will go on if I'm out-voted.