Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff’s “The Future of Free Speech” explains why this pattern keeps recurring. Politicians invoke free speech when they are out of power and narrow it once they have some. University leaders suddenly discover procedural nuance only when they are cornered in a congressional hearing. Democratic governments praise open debate while steadily carving out new exceptions to it. But hypocrisy is not the book’s main subject. Its real concern is free-speech pessimism: the growing belief that open debate is simply too dangerous to leave alone. Before Trump promised restoration, universities had already trained students to self-censor, employers had turned speech into a reputational risk, and the Biden years had supplied their own examples of speech panic, from the Disinformation Governance Board to pressure on platforms to take down posts. Censorship rarely ends with the people who first justify it. More often, it creates the backlash that empowers the next censor.

The book’s central argument is that we are living through a “free-speech recession.” The second half of the twentieth century was a golden age, when democracies were principled that liberty required broad protection for dissent, criticism, and open argument. That time is now gone. Drawing on Freedom House data, the authors note that roughly 6.3 billion people in eighty-one countries experienced a decline in freedom of expression in just ten years. Internet freedom has declined for fourteen consecutive years. Pew found in 2023 that 55 percent of Americans support government restrictions on false information online even at the cost of free expression, up from 39 percent in 2018. Mchangama and Kosseff argue that America’s free-speech tradition is now under greater threat than at any point since the Second Red Scare. This is not a book about dictators doing what dictators do. Its subject is the spreading conviction, even inside liberal democracies, that open debate is too risky to leave alone.

The book’s moral center is not built around the hateful men who populate some of its most memorable chapters, but around the people who most needed the right to speak. Frederick Douglass published an abolitionist newspaper while the postmaster general intercepted his mail. Eleanor Roosevelt fought to make free expression a universal human right over the objections of governments that preferred silence. Nelson Mandela argued from the dock at Rivonia that the right to speak was inseparable from the right to be free. Mchangama and Kosseff invoke these figures not as decoration, but as proof. The people who most needed free speech were never the powerful. They were the people the powerful wanted silenced.

That is why the chapter on the Four Hateful Men lands so hard. The speakers at the center of those cases were racists, bigots, and provocateurs, nothing like Douglass or Mandela. Yet the precedents advanced the rights of the very groups they despised. Terminiello v. Chicago, a case defending an anti-Semitic priest’s right to deliver a hate-filled speech to an angry mob, was later cited to overturn the convictions of 187 Black students arrested for peacefully protesting segregation at the South Carolina state legislature. Critics like law professor Mary Anne Franks argue that the First Amendment has been hijacked by a white male supremacist agenda. The historical record says otherwise. The ugliest cases built the legal floor that the civil rights movement stood on. Rights that depend on the moral appeal of the speaker do not remain rights for long.

That tension lies at the heart of the book. Two democratic instincts are in conflict, and they have been for decades. The first is the Jackson instinct. Justice Robert H. Jackson prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, saw Julius Streicher sentenced to death for propaganda, and came home convinced that democracies could be too trusting of dangerous movements. In his Terminiello dissent, he warned that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. The second is Justice Louis Brandeis’s instinct: that the answer to bad speech is not enforced silence but counterspeech, civic confidence, and the marketplace of ideas. Mchangama and Kosseff write squarely on Brandeis’s side, and their European chapters supply the evidence. Censorship does not simply threaten liberty. It backfires, hardening grievance and handing the next censor a ready-made justification.

That backfire effect runs through every country they examine. Germany, France, and Britain have all built expanding regimes of hate-speech laws, anti-extremism rules, and anti-disinformation measures in the name of preserving liberal order through militant democracy. The returns, however, are weak. Germany’s NetzDG, aimed at forcing platforms to remove hate speech quickly, has been in force for years; yet right-wing extremist offenses still reached a new high in 2024. France had more than 20,000 people listed as security threats in 2020, then watched Marine Le Pen win 33 percent of the vote in the first round of Macron’s snap election. British police now make around 12,000 arrests a year for offensive online posts. The Dutch case is the starkest. When Geert Wilders was prosecuted for anti-Muslim hate speech in 2011 and again in 2016, his party surged both times and became the largest in parliament by 2023. These laws do not quiet extremism, restore trust, or reduce polarization. They expand the state’s authority over expression.

Germany supplies the book’s sharpest example of that danger. After October 7, crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism reached not only extremists but Jewish critics of Israel. Iris Hefets, a Jewish activist born in Israel, was prosecuted under Germany’s anti-Semitism laws for protesting the war in Gaza and calling it a genocide. The state begins by claiming it is protecting minorities. It ends up using those same powers against the people it claimed to protect.

When democracies censor, they do not merely imitate authoritarian logic. They legitimize it. Two days after the EU banned RT and Sputnik, Russia blocked the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Voice of America, citing the EU’s own rationale about false information and national security. In Hong Kong, the 2020 National Security Law that jailed Jimmy Lai borrowed the same language of public order that liberal democracies had spent years normalizing. Once democracies grow comfortable treating speech as a threat to manage, they hand authoritarians both the vocabulary and the excuse.

The book’s most interesting example is Taiwan. With China targeting the island with sustained propaganda, Taiwan has more reason than most democracies to panic about disinformation and foreign influence. Yet it has largely resisted the European path anyway. Rather than build a censorship regime, it leaned into radical transparency, rapid public communication, and civil-society fact-checking. Digital Affairs Minister Audrey Tang’s formulation is the book’s best line: make the state transparent to citizens, but never ask citizens to be transparent to the state. Openness is not a weakness. It is a democratic advantage. That model has a partial echo even on the platform most associated with free-speech absolutism. X’s Community Notes, where volunteers with opposing viewpoints must agree before a correction goes public, has proven surprisingly resilient. It has flagged Karoline Leavitt for falsely claiming that most Americans supported the war in Iran and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for misrepresenting ICE’s killing of Alex Pretti. Its most unintentionally revealing validator may be Elon Musk, who ranks forty-third on his own platform’s Community Notes leaderboard.

The weakness of “The Future of Free Speech” is not that it lacks seriousness or candor. Mchangama and Kosseff do not pretend to offer a magic bullet, and they are right to reject the fantasy that censorship can solve democratic disorder. Still, the book is far more persuasive in diagnosis than in blueprint. Its practical alternative leans heavily on Taiwan, which it treats not just as an illuminating exception but as a prototype. That makes the case both stronger and more vulnerable: stronger because Taiwan shows that democratic resilience need not depend on censorship, more vulnerable because one unusually cohesive and geopolitically singular society can carry only so much argumentative weight.

The authors acknowledge that digital platforms bring out some of the worst parts of human behavior. What the book does not fully resolve is how its preferred remedies work in an online world shaped not just by virality, but by personalization. For curious people, this era is remarkable. Ordinary users now have access to more arguments, reporting, archives, and serious debate than any previous generation. But abundance cuts both ways. Large language models and recommendation systems do not just spread falsehood faster. They can generate tailored content that tells users what they already want to hear. That makes the problem deeper than ordinary propaganda. Community Notes and similar tools can help, but only up to a point. They can correct claims. They cannot make people want correction. Still, the alternative is worse. A government that protects citizens from being misled also claims the power to decide what they are allowed to hear. The best case for an open internet is not that it guarantees wisdom. It is that it keeps rival arguments and evidence available to anyone willing to look. That does not prevent democratic error. But it does make bad ideas harder to protect from scrutiny and easier to discredit over time.

The real danger, Mchangama and Kosseff argue, is not censorship itself. It is the confidence behind it. The people most eager to regulate speech rarely think of themselves as censors. They think of themselves as realists, managing risk, preserving democracy, and protecting the vulnerable. The book is a rebuttal to the belief, now common in both politics and academia, that free speech is a principle for easier times, a luxury once politics grows too volatile, too hateful, or too online.

“The Future of Free Speech” is strongest when it shows how censorship backfires. It is less convincing on whether counterspeech and transparency can hold up in an abundant information economy that rewards affirmation more reliably than judgment. That gap is real. But Mchangama and Kosseff’s larger point still stands. A free society cannot save its citizens from every falsehood before it is believed or every bad idea before it is tried. Some illusions collapse only when they meet reality. Democracies do not prove their strength by silencing what they fear. They prove it by refusing to panic and by allowing error to be tested in public.

This past winter break I dedicated my break to my education and career, and where else is better than Central America? Costa Rica, specifically, has a very large stray dog population. Riding on the bus, I found my heart yearning for the malnourished dogs scrambling for scraps along the roads. But where I felt discomfort, the locals were unbothered. These stray dogs were common, much less an immediate issue. Still, years after my first trip, I remember the ache in my stomach.

On my second trip back to Costa Rica, I spent four days at the vet clinic engrossed in the rainforest of La Suerte. Three days were dedicated to neuter and spray surgeries with one day up in wellness. Unlike my first experience, the veterinarian allowed the students to take on a patient of our own and individually guide them through the surgical process in its entirety. From gathering medication to prepping for surgery to recovery.

My last patient on the trip was a “feral” cat. It was better to deem them feral than to believe one can predict a cat’s behavior. The procedure was to measure their weight before collecting the medication, the dosage is based on weight. Before placing a catheter in for surgery, a catheter allows easy access into the bloodstream for medication if complications arise, we gave them ketamine Then, it was my responsibility as the cat’s assistant to restrain her. As the cat went down, I administered subcutaneous and intramuscular injections, shaved and sterilized the surgical field with alcohol and iodine soaked gauze squares, and guided the patient through the recovery process until they were fit to be released. Recovery is one of the most important stages of the surgical process. It’s often where the patient’s body temperature drops, so students were stationed by their patient’s side to measure heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature every five minutes. Once the patient was stable, they were ready to go back home.

The three surgical days consisted of this repeated cycle. Patients were loaded on the dock and chugged in only to be splurted out the next minute. The speediness of the entire process left me wondering what was being overlooked. There’s a reason why spays in professional settings take more than three minutes. Caution was forgotten.

It should be said that I am thankful to the MRC organization for having developed my skills as a pre-vet student, skills that were established back in high school that one Costa Rican summer. However, it’s from this experience that I have learned what vet med should not be.

For background, MRC has been offering free veterinary care for years. And for years, owners bring their cats or dogs or strays they were able to grab and seek service, whether that be a check-up or surgery. And with each medication that was given, sutures that were used, cones wrapped around necks, they were all free of cost. MRC has managed to treat all patients that turn to their help without seeing a single colón. But, I ask, at what risk?

Smaller doses of ketamine were given to the patients. This caused patients to wake up in the middle of surgery, have abnormally high heart rates during recovery, experience more pain than a GP back in the United States would allow. Oftentimes more anesthetic would be given as whimpers were heard from the dog, but it was also common for the vet to rush through the procedure to limit the small amount of ketamine that was available. Unfortunately, more than one of my patients fell victim to this issue.

Of course, it has to be understood that our free-cost clinic could not be as precautious as those in the US are. We didn’t have the money or the resources. We were limited to what we had, and what we did have wasn’t much. So, to a degree, I understand the risks the veterinarian and others took during the surgical process. But it still leaves me wondering. Would it have been better to have given more ketamine, done more sutures for resources to deplete faster for us to help fewer patients? I’m not sure.

Yet as I watched the sunlight climb my window I missed the cold rain of Ireland. I missed the heavy black backpack that carried my life for five weeks. Two sweatshirts. One Carhartt jacket. Two pairs of dark jeans. A rotating cast of shirts, socks, and underwear. I missed hostel kitchens that smelled of fish and damp metal, crowded with strangers waiting for boiling water. I missed walking thirty thousand steps a day and peeling off shoes from red blistered feet. Most of all I missed being alone thousands of miles from everyone I knew. I missed three hour friendships that lasted exactly as long as the city they were born in.

If my Dean Rusk project required a title it would be Death Practices in Ireland. I gathered enough interviews, photos, and notes to construct a research paper on funerary traditions, civic infrastructure, and the choreography of grief. Instead I stared at my vinyl copy of Pet Sounds. The sheep on the cover pulled my mind back to Ireland’s hills and seaside farms, and I began to imagine my time there as an assortment of albums.Each city and cemetery, each hostel kitchen and rain-soaked street, formed its own record with its own mood and tempo.

I sorted through my records and pulled one of Dublin. The cover felt cool and matte against my fingers, like the marble headstones at Glasnevin. An old Irish man led me through the cemetery as if he were related to every grave we passed. At the entrance lay the famine graves, hundreds of thousands buried in mass plots with few names and no ages. Farther in were the martyrs of the War of Independence, young men whose unfinished lives became part of the republic’s origin story. Finally we reached the newer burials, people who had died in old age, surrounded by families they had raised and outlived. The famine dead and the revolutionary dead were remembered for the lives they were denied. The elderly were honored for the full arcs they had been granted. In Ireland both were worth marking because both said something about the nation.

Rows of Irish yew bent over the paths like old men watching the living walk among the dead. I expected silence. Instead, children chased birds, traced names on headstones, and laughed as dogs sniffed the earth. It was the first place I saw death treated as both narrative and infrastructure, a story to be told and a system to be maintained.

The second side of the record was scratched dark and smelled of cold stone, dust, and iron. At Kilmainham Gaol we walked through the small chapel where Joseph Plunkett married Grace Gifford under the rifles of British soldiers an hour before his execution. His wedding ring barely had time to warm against his skin. The gaol held the leaders of the Easter Rising, men who had tried to wrench Ireland toward independence and were now waiting for death. Cobblestone walls narrowed the sky into a strip of pale light. A single cross marked the place where the firing squad stood. The bodies were buried without ceremony in a mass grave.

The British believed the executions would extinguish the rebellion, but they just created martyrs. Men once dismissed as fanatics became tragic heroes whose deaths authenticated the cause of Irish independence. Working part-time in a funeral home in the United States had taught me that death could be sanitized and private. Kilmainham taught me it could be disciplinary and nation-building. The state kills to control and the nation remembers to legitimize.

I sifted again and pulled the small damp record of Galway. It opened with the warm voice of a funeral director who in his free time acted in children’s musicals. He told me about wakes and the things people say about them, half reverent and half amused. “God, she looks better than the last time I saw her,” he said, mimicking an old woman peering into the coffin. At wakes people drink, tell stories, gossip, pray, laugh, and cry. Death is not quarantined from life. It spills into the kitchen and the parlor. In Galway life begins its afterlife among the living.

Outside the city the countryside held older forms of remembrance. At Poulnabrone and other portal tombs built roughly 5500 years ago, the dead were sent into the next world beneath slabs of limestone tilted like doorways. These tombs made death feel less like an ending and more like a passage. Wind hissed through the stones and sheep grazed around them as if history were simply another field to be eaten down. Time had not erased the dead there. It had folded them into the landscape.

I sifted again and pulled the industrial record of Cork. Its grooves smelled of rust and salt, a reminder that the city grew around its river and its prisons. At Spike Island the dead did not arrive all at once as they had in the famine graves. They arrived slowly, worn down by confinement and labor. The tour guide called it the Irish Alcatraz, but the comparison missed the point. Here time itself became the instrument of punishment. Inside the prison blocks the air was sour with iron and damp paper. Rows of cells lined the corridor like filing cabinets for unwanted bodies. Death here was administrative. Ledgers recorded inmates with neat columns of crimes, sentences, ages, illnesses, and deaths. Before a person could die, they had to be categorized. Before they could be remembered, they had to be processed.

Across the harbor in Cobh I found a different kind of death. It was the last place many Irish touched before emigrating. Families stood on the pier and watched sons and daughters disappear into the Atlantic, not knowing if they would ever return. Emigration became a kind of social death. The body survived, but the person was removed from the community. Letters arrived in place of faces. Names were spoken in the past tense. At home belongings were kept in drawers like relics. The living mourned without funerals, even as the emigrants built new lives abroad.

I sifted once more and pulled the Belfast record. Its surface was cracked with barbed grooves and printed in two colors, green and orange. Belfast was the first city where the dead did not simply rest. They took sides. We drove past murals of young men in balaclavas holding rifles, their faces once alive and now rendered in flat paint. In other places the martyrs wore suits and soft smiles, their portraits framed with lilies or Celtic knots. On one wall the words “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children” floated above a painted funeral procession. In Belfast the dead are drafted into the present. They do not leave the conflict. They continue it. We walked along the peace walls, massive slabs of concrete and steel that split neighborhoods into Catholic and Protestant like the spine of a broken book. Families pinned notes, photographs, and dates to the walls as if negotiating who the dead belonged to. Cemeteries, murals, parades, and plaques all claimed the dead as evidence for competing histories of suffering. A city once torn apart had become a public classroom where the dead were not simply mourned but interpreted.

Back in my quiet room in Chidsey I listened through the records and realized that death in Ireland was never merely an ending. It was a structure. It organized memory, community, politics, and even migration. The Irish dead did not disappear. They continued working. In Dublin they became a national narrative. In Galway, they remained in the house through wakes and rituals. In Cork they were processed by the state or lost across the sea. In Belfast they became martyrs and arguments.

What I learned is that a society’s treatment of death reveals what it values. If the dead are hidden, the living grieve alone. If the dead are shared, the living are held together. Ireland refuses to let the dead vanish. It keeps them in stories, walls, ledgers, graves, and songs. The result is that death becomes part of public life rather than its quiet opposite. Death must live in the public sphere because the worst thing that can happen to the living is to forget that they are going to die. When mortality disappears from view, life becomes shallow and private grief becomes heavier.

The broader lesson is simple. Death belongs to the living. We do not choose how we die, but we do choose how we remember. And those choices determine whether a society fractures or coheres. I slid the records back into their sleeves, realizing that none of them were really about dying at all. They were about how the living arrange what remains, turning silence into memory after the record’s last notes fade.

Following the election and inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, there has been debate regarding whether the ideology of individualism or collectivism is superior. Mamdani and his supporters praise collectivism, while their critics vehemently argue that history shows this is a siren song that must be ignored at all costs. President of Davidson College Libertarians Gabriel Russ-Nachamie argued in “The Coldness of Collectivism” that collectivism has failed spectacularly, from the Soviet experiment to Maoist China. These catastrophes reflect the failures of command economies, but ought not be used to evaluate all collectivist policies. Russ-Nachamie is essentially equating the efficacy of any policy that might benefit the collective over an individual to that of planned economies. This is simply a false equivocation, as the relevant question is not whether to subscribe to pure collectivism or individualism, but rather how democratic governments ought to address market failures without distorting price signals and individual liberties. I will concede that I believe some of Zohran’s platform does overstep with regard to price controls, such as the proposed rent freeze. However, that does not mean his stance towards practical collectivism should be tossed aside without a second thought.

The central problem of command economies is information. Russ-Nachamie eloquently describes failures resulting from such problems in a command economy. His example regarding the complexity of information required for something as seemingly simple as the production of a pencil makes this idea clear. This process relies heavily on information constantly updated by price levels in a responsive market based on the incentives afforded to actors in the economy. This information is lost whenever binding price controls are imposed, causing shortages and surpluses that would otherwise be avoided. For Zohran’s rent freeze policy, this is where I find the most issue, as putting a binding price control creates inefficiencies and misallocations, which likely outweigh any benefits to the well-being of a few individuals who stand to gain from the locked prices. This is why price controls should be used very sparingly when making policy, and their costs must be truly weighed against a tangible gain. An example of a socially beneficial price control is a minimum wage. Minimum wage is effectively a price floor on labor, preventing firms from exploiting individuals who lack bargaining power and cannot afford to refuse a job offer with a suboptimal wage. This is a prime example of how sparing, but intelligent, use of a collectivist price control can be beneficial to society and broadly endorsed.

This is where a distinction must be made. There is a stark difference between command economies, such as those of the 20th-century authoritarian regimes, and mixed economies, such as those of most modern democracies. The types of economies that Russ-Nachamie references throughout his article are all complete command economies. These systems had broadly applied price controls and central planning, whereas in typical market-based economies, such as in the U.S. and by extension New York, there are few of these price controls. Furthermore, the implementation of these policies is generally tactful and thought-out. Being compared to the image that Zohran envisions for New York City would likely be taken as an insult by the radicals who built previous communist regimes.

Now, even if I were to concede that all price controls are always inadvisable, collectivist policy is a broad umbrella encompassing any policy intended to primarily benefit broader society. Under this definition, there are still many “collectivist” policies within Zohran’s platform that would be beneficial without price controls. This includes free public bus fares, the construction of affordable housing, the fight against corporate exploitation, higher tax rates on the wealthy, and no-cost childcare. Each of these policies aims to address a market externality that a laissez-faire system would turn into an inefficiency. Zohran’s approach to addressing externalities is built on creating new incentive structures through reformed regulation as well as direct financial carrots and sticks.

There are many examples of how collectivist policy has benefited Americans for decades, if not centuries. Public education is a collectively paid-for service that benefits all Americans. Even if you yourself never attended a public school, you still benefit from the positive externalities associated with having an educated public providing services to your community. Public infrastructure is the result of collectivist policy, paying for highways that connect our cities and allow for the transportation of not only goods but also people at far lower cost, benefiting everyone. Antitrust policies have benefited all consumers since they were first implemented under Theodore Roosevelt, preventing the exploitation of the public through monopoly pricing and price setting behavior by large cartels.

Some might be concerned that this could lead to a “slippery slope”; however, I would argue that is extremely unlikely, considering we are talking about a handful of policies directed towards specific problems in one city in one state in a very divided country. The likelihood that any of these policies are implemented at a country wide scale is essentially negligible. The only way this becomes a widespread policy stance is if there is at least some degree of success in this particular iteration of collectivist policy.

If Mamdani’s policies fail, they should be rejected for their lack of merit. If they succeed in addressing externalities without damaging individual liberties and market efficiencies, they should be accepted and adopted elsewhere. Our real quarrels should not lie with collectivism itself, but with the refusal to delineate between authoritarian command economies and pragmatic democratic governance. Sound policy is not an ideological holy war, but rather the balancing of incentives, information, and human welfare. Perhaps with such an attitude, we can warm any coldness from collectivism, but also quell the inferno of individualism.

When we imagine professors, we often picture them only inside the classroom: leading discussion, assigning readings, writing on the board. But professors were once students too, sitting where we sit now, uncertain about what comes next.

That was part of the reason I wanted to interview Dr. Brian J. Shaw, the Richardson Professor of Political Science, who has taught at Davidson since 1982. Over more than four decades, he has taught in the first-year writing program, the humanities program, and the political science department.

In conversation, Shaw did not describe his life as a carefully planned path. Instead, he returned again and again to a phrase that surprised me: many of the most important turns, he said, were simply “a great accident.”

At the center of those accidents was one word he chose to describe himself: curious.

Background

Shaw grew up in Providence, Rhode Island.

“I grew up right in the city,” he said. “The first eighteen years of my life were spent there.”

He is a first-generation college student from what he described as a “working-class, lower middle-class” family. His father grew up in Brooklyn, and his mother was from Rhode Island. He attended Providence public schools and, like many students in his neighborhood, had little sense that college was a natural next step.

“I had no great aspirations for college,” he said. “I grew up in a neighborhood where no one went to college. I didn’t know anyone who went to college.”

Becoming a Professor (Without Planning To)

One striking feature of Shaw’s story is how candid he is about uncertainty early in his life.

“I was not a particularly good high school student,” he said, “putting it mildly.”

He attended a demanding public high school where most students continued to college, and that expectation mattered. Shaw enrolled at the University of Rhode Island.

College, however, slowly changed his outlook.

“I realized that my parents had actually sacrificed a good bit to make this available to me,” he said. “And I realized I didn’t have to be there. It was costing my family money. So if I were there, I should pay attention.”

When he began paying attention, something else happened: he became interested.

Shaw later transferred to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he majored in psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience. While there, he wandered into political philosophy almost by chance.

“I just happened to take a couple of courses in political philosophy,” he said. “One of which was not a happy experience, and one of which was.”

Even after graduating, Shaw still did not know what he wanted to do next. Then came the turning point: France.

France: “It Opened My Eyes”

Shaw went to France, as he describes it, “out of the blue.”

“I didn’t speak a word of French,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about France.”

At the time he had already applied to and been accepted by several law schools. But the opportunity to go to Europe felt too rare to ignore.

“I’d never been really farther than New York,” he said. “So the chance to go to Europe was very exciting.”

The year abroad proved transformative.

“It really turned my life around,” he said. “Because it was a chance to see things from completely different perspectives.”

That experience eventually led him to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Initially, he expected to stay only a year or two.

Then another accident occurred.

“I discovered that I really, really, really liked graduate school,” he said. “I really liked studying political philosophy.”

He stayed for six years. Not long after, he accepted a position in North Carolina, at Davidson College, where he has taught ever since.

A Classroom Built on Strong Arguments

Throughout the interview, Shaw returned to a central idea about teaching: students deserve the strongest possible version of every argument they encounter.

We discussed his course Foundations of Liberalism, which was awarded the “Spirit of Inquiry” award by the John W. Pope Center for Education Policy. The class explores major liberal thinkers who disagree profoundly about what liberalism should mean.

The course culminates with two figures who represent very different interpretations of liberalism: John Rawls and Robert Nozick.

What matters to Shaw is not pushing students toward a preferred answer.

“What education ought to be about,” he said, “is exposing students to contrasting perspectives and asking them to make their way through it.”

He compared his approach to that of a lawyer.

“When we’re doing Marx, I try to make the strongest case I can for Marx. When we’re doing Lenin, I try to make the strongest case for Lenin,” he said. “I’m almost like a lawyer. Depends on who’s paying me that week.”

And when students ask what he personally believes?

“My opinion doesn’t matter,” he said. “They should just deal with the authors that we’re reading.”

The Word He Chose: “Curious”

When I asked Shaw for a single word that describes him, he paused before answering.

“Curious,” he said.

The explanation led to one of the most personal moments of the conversation.

His father, he explained, was “entirely self-educated.” He worked during the day and read and wrote at night. Shaw remembers weekends spent visiting the library and Sunday mornings going to the train station to buy newspapers: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Providence Journal.

“We just read a lot,” he said.

Shaw added that he never felt he possessed quite the same level of discipline as his father. But he did inherit the curiosity.

Eventually, that curiosity shaped the life he chose.

“So I began to think that perhaps it might be nice if I could find a job that would allow me to read for a living.”

He has been doing exactly that at Davidson since 1982.

Outside the Classroom

Like many professors, Shaw’s life extends well beyond the classroom.

For many years his main hobby was cycling.

“I would guess I’ve biked probably a good quarter of a million miles,” he said.

He rode throughout the British Isles and France and often logged “hundreds and hundreds of miles a week” with local cycling clubs. His wife once joked that she had not realized he held two jobs: teaching and cycling.

Eventually he stopped due to back problems, including a fractured spine from high school football and later surgeries.

Music remains a major passion.

“Classical music,” he said, “though not exclusively. I also like blues and jazz.”

One particular interest stands out: French Baroque opera.

Over the years Shaw has built a large record collection, numbering in the thousands. He maintains multiple turntables and takes careful care of the LPs. When he and his wife purchased their first home, they even reinforced part of the basement to support the weight of the records.

“It is a collection,” he said.

Why Davidson Matters

When asked what he appreciates most about Davidson, Shaw pointed first to the academic environment itself.

“The kinds of things that I do are not really the kinds of things I could do at many schools,” he said.

Small classes and strong students allow him to teach in the way he believes works best: slow reading, sustained discussion, and engagement with demanding ideas.

“You have to have small classes, and you have to have very good students,” he said. “And Davidson students are very good.”

He also spoke warmly about his colleagues and about the institution’s evolution over the decades. When he first arrived in 1982, Davidson felt like a “small, fairly rural school.” Today it sits within the orbit of a rapidly growing Charlotte region.

“I’ve been extremely fortunate to be here,” he said.

His Advice to Students

When asked what advice he would give Davidson students, Shaw did not offer a formula for success.

Instead, he offered something simpler and harder: take your interests seriously.

“It sounds corny to say,” he said, “but it’s essentially true. Students should follow their interests, whatever they are.”

He also described Davidson in a way that caught my attention.

“Davidson is a luxury product,” he said.

Not because it is flashy, but because it provides something increasingly rare: time and space to think.

“Not everyone has the opportunity to spend four years living in a very nice place, having small classes in a small community, reading and thinking about whatever they’d like to do.”

Students should make the most of that opportunity.

“The main reason that you’re here,” he said, “is to read and to think about these things.”

For many people, he added, it may be the last time they have the chance to do so.

On February 20, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. This ruling invalidates both the “fentanyl” tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and the sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs enacted on “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025.

The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, argued that revenue-raising tariffs are a form of taxation that requires congressional authorization, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh dissented on the basis that the IEEPA grants the President authority to “regulate” importation, establishing his ability to unilaterally introduce tariffs. However, this ruling does not affect Section 301 tariffs on goods from China or Section 232 tariffs on steel (50%), aluminum (50%), and automobiles (25%).

Despite President Trump’s repeated insistence that tariffs are “paid for by foreign countries,” a tariff is a tax levied by a government on imported goods. The domestic company that pays the tariff is confronted with three options: sacrifice profit margins, raise prices, or cut costs through layoffs and forgone investment. A February 2026 report from the New York Fed found that 90% of the 2025 tariffs’ economic burden fell on American consumers and businesses. According to the Budget Lab at Yale, consumers pay 31–63% of the cost of tariffs on core goods like clothing and household supplies and 46–96% of tariffs on durable goods such as appliances and electronics.

Since everyone spends a similar amount on necessities regardless of earnings, tariffs function as a regressive sales tax that disproportionately hurts low-income households. The Tax Foundation, a center-right think tank, estimates that tariffs caused an average household tax increase of $1000 in 2025. This is an amount that 53% of Americans say they lack the sufficient liquidity to cover in Bankrate’s most recent Emergency Savings Report, and runs contrary to the President’s campaign promise of “making America affordable again.” Despite this, the ruling unlocks up to $175 billion in tariff revenue for refunds to affected firms, which does nothing to remedy the impact on consumers and produces little incentive for businesses to reduce prices to pre-tariff levels.

While the administration points to a fourth option of companies reshoring supply chains to bring middle-wage manufacturing jobs back to the US, Section 232 tariffs raise the cost of imported inputs, offsetting potential job gains with job losses in downstream industries like automotives and construction where there are 80 jobs for every job in steel mills and 177 jobs for every job in aluminum production. The Tax Foundation predicts a loss of 154,000 jobs in 2026 as a direct consequence of tariffs. This phenomenon can be witnessed in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia Metropolitan Statistical Area, where Parkdale Mills, a historic textile manufacturer in Gastonia, recently shuttered its Walnut Cove factory and laid off 72 workers due to rising costs.

Tariffs imposed on exports from other countries do not exist in isolation; US trading partners such as China, Mexico, Canada, and the European Union have responded with retaliatory tariffs, causing American firms to lose access to critical export markets. According to the John Locke Foundation, North Carolina’s agricultural industry is projected to lose $695 million in net farm income and incur a total economic loss of $1.9 billion, over 2% of the state’s GDP. After factoring in ripple effects from lost revenue, North Carolina stands to lose 8,000 jobs, concentrated in rural communities.

Even without accounting for job losses from higher input costs and retaliatory measures, steel consumers paid $650,000 per job created in the steel industry through tariffs in 2018. Meanwhile, other job creation programs such as infrastructure investment are much more cost-effective, creating 18,000 jobs per $1 billion in spending, or approximately $55,600 per job.

In response to the Supreme Court ruling, President Trump imposed a 15% global surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. However, Section 122 tariffs have a statutory limit of 150 days, after which Congress must vote to extend them. This grants Senate Democrats the opportunity to use the filibuster to allow the 15% tariff to expire on July 24, 2026. Even then, the surcharge is vulnerable to lawsuits since Section 122 can only be invoked to address “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits,” which the current “system of floating exchange rates completely eliminates” according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.

President Trump’s decision to continue to pursue sweeping tariffs comes as his trade agenda faces a crisis of legitimacy. A February 2026 ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll reveals that 64% of American adults disapprove of the administration’s handling of tariffs, including a significant 72% of independents who view the policy as exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis the President promised to solve.

Trump’s tariffs have time and again proven themselves to be inefficient, inequitable, and utterly pointless for certain goods. As Pennsylvania Representative Madeleine Dean told Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, “We cannot build bananas in America.”

Necessitas facit licitum quod alias non licitur.

Necessity makes that lawful which is otherwise unlawful.

The doctrine of necessity is a controversial legal maxim of extraordinary proportions.It mandates that under certain exceptional circumstances deemed necessary, the state, or an agency of the state, may engage in activities that would otherwise be in contravention of its constitution and consequently illegal. It is a convention that has served as the legitimiser of coups in countries such as Pakistan, Uganda, Nigeria, and Fiji. This idea is inappropriate at adjudicating any action by an agency of the state, let alone deciding upon a case wherein it has struck a blow against the state in a military takeover. This is because of the looseness of the legal definition of “necessity” that permits the unconstitutional act of the uprooting of a government on the grounds of “restoring justice”. Notwithstanding, this principle has been vastly used by the highest courts of law of the aforementioned states in order to legitimise military governments that unconstitutionally withdrew the fundamental rights of their people, including the right to life. For example, the Zia-ul-Haq regime in Pakistan, which seized power from the civil government in 1977, conducted mass arrests of students, journalists, politicians, and activists in the 1980s under the Defence of Pakistan Ordinance 1971 and the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance 1960. In order to prevent judicial review, the military also suspended the jurisdiction of Pakistan’s superior courts over its military courts and overrode the authority and independence of its judicial system.

The violence inflicted against both the public and the institutional design of the state in the case of Pakistan was a mere illustration of the damage the doctrine of necessity is capable of. Its application is, by any reasonable metric of justice, not a justifiable one. St. Thomas Aquinas’ declaration, “Lex iniusta non est lex” – “an unjust law is no law at all” – comes into picture here. No state that finds itself obliged to provide justice as a public good to its citizenry would be expected to choose this path. Naturally, one might also be forgiven to believe that the doctrine of necessity has no place in the democratic life, for it cannot co-exist with the ideas of constitutional liberalism.

Until it does, albeit in a contorted form.

The evolution of a state governed by a democratic constitution is built around certain rights that its citizens give to themselves and are typically beyond the scope of destruction by any measure available to an agency of the state. These fundamental provisions, rooted in the natural rights of life and liberty, permit citizens to exist in equality and perform activities such as expression, association, religious exercise, and economic occupation without any undue interference by the state. Any legislation or executive ordinances produced by the state that violate this basic structure of the constitution, which is in its essence a manifestation of the social contract that is the foundation of the state itself, is voided by the judiciary as it is found to be without the just character of the law.

The line of control the basic structure attempts to draw, however, blurs when the fundamental rights it attempts to protect are potentially contributory to the possible destabilisation of the state itself, thus compromising the general welfare – and the right to life – of the body politic. Under these circumstances, the state warrants the exercise of emergency statutory and constitutional provisions that permit it to override individual rights, even fundamental ones, in the name of the maintenance of public order. These emergency provisions, therefore, are premised on the doctrine of necessity.

While constitutionally run states cannot exercise emergency powers without a formal declaration of exigency, which in most cases must be sanctioned by the national legislature within a certain period, it is important to note that these provisions have a critical flaw that warrants consideration. States often have constitutional provisions that permit “reasonable” restrictions on the freedom of speech and expression that go beyond the prospects of limiting hate speech and the incitement of violence. The constitutions of India, Bangladesh, and Turkey, for example, allow laws that restrict the freedom of speech and expression on vague grounds such as maintaining state integrity and public morality. Such leeway to restrict civil rights only compounds when dealing with more extreme circumstances that threaten public safety, the most significant one of which is terrorism.

Considered to be a significant criminal offense that entails the simultaneous destabilisation of the state, the incitement of violence within the national community, and the actual commission of violence against members of the community, it is interesting to see how terrorism has been dealt with as an existential threat by states, especially in the context of the 9/11 Attacks and the Global War on Terror. Drawing from Christopher Preble, states have adopted a “zero-risk” policy against the possibility of terrorism and have implemented protocols ranging from preventive detention to digital surveillance to the deployment of military and paramilitary forces within domestic territories. What has also been seen is an increase in the rhetoric of security being treated as a fundamental right. For example, Franco Frattini, the Vice-President of the European Commission from 2004 to 2008, termed the right to security as “A precondition for all other freedoms.” Richard Jackson, in his work on the rhetoric of counter-terrorism, contended that the way in which the public narrative around acts of terror is instrumentalised to permit the strengthening of the punitive power of the state. The state effectively cultivates a narrative wherein innocent civilians are pitted against barbaric monsters and the spirit of the democratic state is at the threat of being put to the sword, thus creating access to emergency powers even easier. This is indicative of a global transition from attempting to balance liberty and general welfare to prioritising public order over all else. Furthermore, since these measures neither fall within the traditional ambit of emergency provisions typically used in the case of insurrection and war, or are used for dealing with problems that would have otherwise had a timeline (thus warranting sunset clauses which would have terminated these powers after the exigent circumstances are dealt with), the state is not as constrained as it would otherwise have been in a conventional national crisis. Consequently, what we have are governments with extensive powers to withdraw the liberties of their citizens with little to no accountability, and this is a problem.

This securitization of the doctrine of necessity is exactly what permits governments to remain authoritarian in a democratic guise today. By creating a worldview for the citizenry wherein the nation is under a constant state of siege against untrustworthy foreigners and disloyal citizens, the executive forces laws that permits it sweeping punitive powers down the throat of the legislature on the grounds of national survival. It then uses these powers to aggressively crack down on dissent: civil society and political opposition are the first to go. A report by Ben Saul, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, warns against the global exercise of anti-terror laws against ordinary citizens without due process or judicial safeguards. This issue worsens when the other branches of the state, especially the judiciary, defer to the executive on counter-terrorism cases. Instead of taking a firm stance on the maintenance of the basic structure, courts globally are more reluctant to rule against the government under these circumstances. In many scenarios, the onus of proving guilt beyond a reasonable level of doubt is also reversed from the prosecution to the accused, case in point being India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2019: the presumption of innocence thus devolves into the presumption of guilt, which is in itself a perversion of the golden thread principle of criminal law.

In conclusion, the securitization of the doctrine of necessity in the constitutional state presents a paradox – the political order emergency provisions claim to protect may be destroyed by those very safeguards in a time of exigency. Consequently, the question that begs consideration is not whether the state of exception is needed in a national crisis, but rather whether a national crisis is triggered by the declaration of the state of exception itself.

My colleague Nic Cutler wrote in The Honor Code Prisoner’s Dilemma that the “suboptimal stable state” on campus today was the outcome of an unfortunate feedback loop, students and professors in a deadly downward lockstep of reducing trust, neither party to blame or with the power to break out. But a feedback loop has to start somewhere. The Honor Code is tied to the foundations of Davidson itself, dating back nearly two centuries to its inception in 1837. The Honor Code has withstood the Civil War, two world wars, integration, and co-education. What it could not withstand, however, was a deadly combination of societal pressures that began to combine only recently.

The first of these factors is, ironically enough, the declining value of the college degree. At the time of the Honor Code’s formalization, not even 10% of Americans went to college; today the figure is over 60%. The commodification of the bachelor’s degree has had consequences that range far and wide across American society, but the one most relevant here is that having a college degree means far less in 2026 than in 1966. The degree has become an expectation instead of a qualification, a box to check when applying for almost any white-collar role; today, most college graduates do not end up working in a field related to their degree.

On campus, this decline in value manifests in additional pressure, both academically and in extracurriculars, with students needing to “do more” with their time in college with every passing year. As employers begin to expect extensive leadership experience, several summer internships , and a straight-A average for even “normal” jobs, the pressure upon students inexorably grows, and the option of an easy way out becomes steadily more attractive. Even this duress, though, was not enough to really show the cracks in the Honor Code until recently; Davidson students, after all, are selected for both their honor and their ability to work under pressure. But honor and resistance to pressure cannot remain when the barriers to cheating disappear.

The advent of generative AI has been a watershed moment for academia as a whole, but Davidson has felt its effects particularly keenly. It takes so little effort to run that paper through ChatGPT, to ask Claude to touch up your coding assignment, to query Gemini about the film that you just didn’t have time to watch. Generative AI strikes at the heart of the twin pillars that kept the Honor Code afloat—individual compliance and strict reporting. In practice, this means that cheating is both significantly more accessible and extremely difficult to accurately report, creating a student body where misconduct is as widespread as its reporting is not.

It’s easy to point fingers and assign blame—to students for cheating in the first place, to the Honor Council for its passivity, to the college’s administration for its slow and inadequate response to AI. I think what matters more, though, is the reality we’re now living every day on campus, an effective “worst of both worlds” where the Honor Code is used as an excuse for inadequate testing procedures and wasted class time. These conditions are only going to get worse as entry-level jobs are cut and generative AI continues to improve. Any student who now chooses to follow the Code is at a disadvantage, and we’re seeing the consequences in real time. I’ve personally witnessed several professors publicly lamenting the fact that they can’t trust students anymore. We can either do nothing and watch student life continue to deteriorate under an imaginary Code—or face reality. The main problem isn’t an institutional failure nor externalities. The problem is us.

You have broken the Honor Code. I have broken the Honor Code. We have all broken the Honor Code, broken it and beaten it into a shape which scarcely retains any memory of its original. An institution which was once the beating heart of Davidson is now at best a decaying husk, subsumed by layer upon layer of calcified untruth and mistrust. We aren’t turning back, aren’t taking action, aren’t changing the system. This cannot continue—but it will, unless we do something about it.

As Davidson students, students who signed the Honor Code, it’s our responsibility to force college leadership to address the situation on the ground. Even as the death throes of the Code echo across campus, marketing material and admissions spokespeople continue to extol the virtues of take-home reviews. It’s in the college’s interest to keep up the charade as long as they can—to retain the tremendous recognition and advertising power that the Honor Code’s still-untarnished reputation affords them. Actually taking steps to restore the “community of trust” we once had won’t happen without pressure—because it requires acknowledgement that something’s gone wrong in the first place.

This acknowledgement won’t be easy to obtain; it might not be possible, given how easy it seems to be to paper over the cracks. But that shouldn’t matter, economic incentives shouldn’t matter. As Davidson students we are honor bound to hold ourselves and our community to the highest possible standard. Allowing deceit to slip through our fingers unnoticed is the ultimate vindication of the death of the Code. It could be as simple as going to office hours and talking to your professors about what it could take for them to trust students again, or making integrity the central issue when you respond to the Campus Climate survey. All I ask is that you try.

I don’t know if we’re ever going to return to the academic climate we once had—the pressures to cheat today might simply be too strong, the trust between parties on campus too eroded. Rebuilding trust is, as Nic Cutler wrote, far harder than breaking it. That makes it all the more important that we cherish and uphold the trust we do have on this campus, the trust that allows us to leave our bikes unlocked or our laptops out in Flibs all day without a trace of worry. We still have something special here at Davidson—let’s promise to ourselves that we won’t let it slip away.

On Thursday, February 26, Davidson College officially announced the creation of the D.G. and Harriet Wall Martin Institute for Public Good, promising to usher in a new chapter of deliberation, civic engagement, and service on campus. The Institute represents one of the most ambitious investments in Davidson’s civic mission in the college’s history and signals a strong desire for the college to position itself as the national leader in two of its keystone pillars: ethical leadership and democratic engagement.

The announcement in the Duke Performance Hall during common hour came after a cryptic invitation from the President’s office the day prior, inviting its thousands of recipients to hear the “terrific news.” And terrific it was, with a $47 million donor investment to work towards building out the five sectors of the Martin Institute, encompassing deliberation, the arts, public policy, ethics, and civic engagement.

This staggering investment builds on the $4 million federal grant Davidson received earlier this year. Plans for renovations to Phi and Eu Halls and the construction of the new outdoor Mack Plaza between them indicate that the Institute will become a visible center of campus life that will encourage gathering, conversation, and reflection.

The deliberative focus of this initiative will be embodied by The Beacon Program on Deliberation and Free Expression and could be the most interesting test of the institute’s strength. However, the most important work of deliberation at Davidson did not begin with this announcement.

A culture of peer-to-peer debate and intellectual curiosity has existed at Davidson since its founding nearly 200 years ago. One of the most significant steps toward strengthening that culture in recent years was the launch of the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI) in 2020, led by Dr. Graham Bullock. The program is a serious effort to realize Davidson’s Statement of Purpose, which calls on the college to educate students with “disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service.”

The DCI has created a plethora of opportunities for students to practice the exact kind of civic engagement the Statement of Purpose envisions, hosting small Deliberation teams throughout the semester and speaker panels that serve as models for student discussions.

At the same time, the unfortunate reality is that many deliberative events at Davidson attract the same relatively small group of participants. The same twenty or thirty students frequently appear at discussions, eager to engage and willing to give their time to the cause of deliberation. And while their commitment deserves recognition, the more difficult challenge is convincing the hundreds of other students on campus who never attend these conversations at all to show up and try out the deliberative experiment the DCI offers.

If Davidson hopes to fulfill its commitment to developing leaders capable of thoughtful public engagement, the challenge is not simply to host more conversations. It is to convince a broader range of students that this kind of engagement strengthens their own intellectual development, regardless of their academic discipline or political interests.

Deliberation should feel like a natural extension of the liberal arts education that Davidson promises to provide. A biology major discussing climate policy, an economics student debating public welfare programs, or a philosophy student grappling with ethical quandaries are all participating in the same fundamental process of intellectual exchange.

The new Martin Institute presents a significant opportunity to deepen Davidson’s culture of engagement, both within and beyond deliberative spaces. Dr. Hugh Lee, who leads the Institute’s Program on Ethics, Honor, and Leadership, described the broader ambition as helping “Davidson to be a national leader and model for other schools in how to foster a community of honor with a strong honor code, honor council, and system of respect.”

Yet Lee is equally clear that institutional structures alone cannot create that kind of community. Honor, he emphasized, must be something students genuinely believe in and take pride in upholding. It cannot exist merely as a set of rules written in a handbook or enforced through disciplinary procedures, it must be perpetuated proactively. The same principle applies to deliberation. A culture of meaningful conversation cannot be created simply by scheduling programming or administrative initiatives. It must be sustained by students who see engaging with difficult ideas and opposing viewpoints as part of their shared responsibility to the community.

There is also a risk that discussions about deliberation can become hollow if they remain disconnected from the real issues students care about. When conversations feel overly abstract or too carefully moderated, students quickly lose interest.

If the goal is to cultivate a culture of engagement, the discussions must confront the difficult questions that shape public life today. The future of American democracy, political polarization, immigration policy, economic inequality, climate change, artificial intelligence, freedom of speech, and religion are precisely the kinds of issues that demand thoughtful discussions. Avoiding them does not eliminate disagreement; it simply moves those disagreements into less productive spaces such as the combative world of social media.

During a recent visit to Davidson, BridgeUSA founder Manu Meel spoke about the possibility of what he called a “Deliberation Davidson,” a campus culture where students actively engage with one another across ideological and cultural differences. Meel believes many students today are deeply frustrated with the vitriolic tone and stagnation of national politics. “The majority of Americans, and students, are exhausted by the lack of problem-solving and the level of polarization,” he said. BridgeUSA chapters aim to provide an alternative model by encouraging students to engage directly with people who hold different views.

A BridgeUSA chapter is currently being formed at Davidson, adding another initiative to a campus already investing heavily in dialogue and civic engagement. Alongside the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, the new Martin Institute, and the Beacon Program on Deliberation and Free Expression, the chapter enters a space that is already fairly crowded with programs pursuing similar goals. That raises the question of how these efforts will ultimately distinguish themselves from one another. If each initiative ends up hosting similar panels, discussions, and workshops for the same small group of already-engaged students, the broader goal of expanding participation may remain elusive.

If Davidson is serious about strengthening a culture of deliberation, we must not shy away from difficult conversations. The real test of the success of the Martin Institute and related initiatives will not be measured by the number of events hosted, but by whether students feel comfortable engaging honestly with issues that could divide them.

Meaningful deliberation requires more than just a willingness to talk. It demands students who arrive at these conversations informed and prepared.

The modern information environment poses a significant challenge in this regard. Much of the news students encounter today comes through social media feeds, short videos, and curated content designed to attract the user’s attention and not necessarily provoke thoughtful questions or conversations.

Even traditional news outlets sometimes present issues through strongly partisan lenses, with headlines and perspectives that reinforce existing beliefs instead of encouraging deeper reflection. When students enter deliberative spaces relying primarily on fragmented or biased information sources, the conversation itself becomes more difficult and less productive.

Resources such as Tangle, Ground News, AllSides, and ProPublica can help students become more informed citizens and stronger deliberators by offering different approaches to presenting political information and context. While their methods vary from aggregating perspectives across the political spectrum to producing in-depth investigative reporting, they all aim to give readers a clearer understanding of the facts and the range of interpretations surrounding major public issues. Engaging with sources like these can help students approach political conversations with greater context and awareness of competing viewpoints.

Ultimately, the promise of the Martin Institute lies in its ability to bring together several elements that already exist at Davidson. The Institute provides institutional support, the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative offers key programming, student organizations like BridgeUSA can generate grassroots energy, and nonpartisan news platforms can help students approach conversations with a stronger factual foundation.

The question now is whether these pieces can truly come together. Despite the creative announcement teaser, The Martin Institute’s reveal event was noticeably sparse in student attendance, with a much larger presence of alumni, faculty, trustees, and other members of the Davidson community. This raises a natural question about how aware the broader student body is of this new institute and how big of a role it will ultimately play in student life.

Can the college successfully present the Institute as something that helps students grow and better themselves intellectually, take greater pride in their school, and contribute to Davidson’s broader ambitions? Can faculty initiatives, student organizations, and civic programming operate under a shared vision that strengthens the college?

The answer to all of this will depend almost exclusively on student engagement and student buy-in. Deliberation, in particular, is not something students learn by hearing about how to do it. It is something they learn by doing. The Martin Institute can provide the structure and the space. But what will become of it depends on whether the Davidson student community chooses to fill that space with curiosity, courage, and a willingness to wrestle with the difficult questions that could very well define their lives.

“Yesterday, you spent 3 hours on your phone.”

Harmless enough, right? But keep that up for a year, and you have just spent a month and a half of your life aimlessly scrolling. Stretch that to age 75, and that’s over 9 years of your life, surrendered to algorithms designed to steal your attention. In reality, 3 hours is on the short end of the spectrum. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, teenagers spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media apps, with total screen-time likely being much higher.

This digital addiction is common because we are constantly exposed to short-form content. Online, people have a simpler word for it: “brainrot.” Every time you open Instagram, TikTok, or any other highly dopaminergic app, you could be conditioning your brain to expect quick, intense bursts of rewards. If time on these apps is prolonged and becomes a habit, this can make studying, working, or focusing on mundane tasks feel less engaging by comparison. In addition, dopamine, which is our brain’s reward chemical, fluctuates throughout the day, so making a habit out of scrolling first thing in the morning trains your brain to crave that same pace for the rest of the day. As a result, slower, effortful tasks can feel disproportionately difficult after waking up and immediately checking your phone.

Percent distribution of teenagers ages 12–17, by hours of daily screen time: United States, July 2021–December 2023

Another problem with these dopaminergic apps is that they are built around variable rewards: unpredictable scrolling and algorithms that track your watch time, likes, saves, and shares. Wolfram Schultz, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, found that dopamine neurons fire strongest not for the reward itself, but for the surprise of getting more than you anticipated. Once a stimulus becomes predictable, the response fades out entirely. So, the possibility that the next swipe might deliver something better than the last is what keeps you pulled in, and what could turn a harmless 30-minute scroll into your whole afternoon gone.

What Endless Scrolling Does to Your Brain

Aside from the mental health issues, doom scrolling can have multiple effects on your brain. A systematic review and meta-analytic investigation of over 98,000 participants conducted by psychologists at Griffith University found that engagement with short-form videos, like the ones present in TikTok and Instagram is consistently associated with poorer cognitive performance, with the strongest hits landing on attention and inhibitory control—which is your brain’s ability to suppress impulsive behavior. Memory and language also showed much weaker associations, while reasoning abilities weren’t significantly affected at all. The researchers suggest this is driven by two processes: habituation, where your brain becomes desensitized to slower tasks like reading, and sensitization, where constant dopamine rewards condition your brain to crave instant stimulation. Interestingly, these effects were consistent across both young and adult users, meaning your brain’s reward and attention systems don’t have a significant impact on the brain developmental stage.

Furthermore, the same study found that short-form video use is also linked to poorer mental health, with stress and anxiety showing the strongest correlations, and weaker but still notable associations with depression, loneliness, and sleep quality.

How to Break the Cycle

If you find yourself tied to your screen or facing some side effects from this scroll-induced “brain rot,” the good news is that you can fix it. According to Bruce Goldman, a science writer at Stanford Medical School, all you need is a timeout. Goldman states a month is “typically the minimum amount of time we need away from our drug of choice, whether it’s heroin or Instagram, to reset our dopamine reward pathways.”

Deleting the app, setting time limits, or having someone else hold you accountable can all be good measures to keep your screen time in check. As students, we already spend so much time on screens, and supplementing that with hours of meaningless scrolling is only going to make things worse. If you still struggle with keeping it low, find a friend who’s in the same boat, and set screen time password locks on each other’s phones so only the other person knows the code. Write the password down somewhere safe—or don’t. Honestly, losing it might be the point.

February 7^th, 2025. A green gown, a hospital bed, a teddy bear. I sit in a hospital bed, waiting to be seen by a doctor. Fear in my parents’ eyes. A nurse tells me if I’m not careful, doctors will keep me here with no contact with the outside world. For over twenty hours, I sit with my thoughts. What do my parents think of me? My teachers? What does this mean for my future? I was told to stop “faking it for attention.” As a young adult, I was sent home with less than a kid’s dose of antidepressants. My second stay would come three months later, and my next hospitalization seven months after. In both cases, no doctor was ever assigned to my care. All this is to say that my experience with the psychiatric system has been more than unsatisfactory.

In recent years, commercialized drugs have been ubiquitous in American media. No matter where you look – television commercials, billboards, pop-up ads – pharmaceuticals are being displayed constantly. But these are not ordinary consumer products you just buy off the shelf. Psychiatric medication can be life-altering, both positively and negatively. While medications have saved many lives, American society has developed a culture of pharmaceutical quick fixes that prioritizes suppression of symptoms rather than encouraging scientific literacy. The crisis is not medication itself – it is that we are rarely taught what we are taking, why we are taking it, and what alternatives exist. People with disorders like me are not puzzles to be solved or problems to fix; we are people who deserve the same right to choose as anyone else.

Psychiatrists and Pharmaceutical Companies

According to the CDC, one in six American adults were on antidepressants in early 2025. That is somewhere in the 15-17% range, up from 11.3% in 2023. It is not just antidepressants, either; the CDC also reports that 43% of Americans are on some type of mental health medication. As a nation, mental health outcomes stay deeply troubling despite the rising prescription rates. There were drastic increases in suicides in a 15-year period. Back then, 14.1 million Americans were on antidepressants with 20.1% of the US population being treated for mental health. Provisional data shows U.S. suicide deaths fell less than 1% in 2024, showing that although there is some progress, mental health is still a major issue.

To get a drug to the market, it has to go through rigorous testing phases. Lots of time, money, and effort go into clearing for the public. The specifics of any pharmaceutical is there, locked behind a wall of “Here, take this and don’t ask questions.” We must choose to educate ourselves about what we agree to take, and while medication is thought of as the only answer, the underlying mental health issue remains at fault.

The Stigma Around Mental Illness and “Quick-Fix” Culture

A study done by Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) in 2022 shows that 23% of adults seek mental health care, with women more likely to do so than men. But accessing that treatment often comes with steep financial barriers. One in five Americans do not fill a prescription because of the cost, and one in seven risks taking a lower dose or skipping doses for the same reason. Consider what this says about our society and the economy. There is the philosophy that nothing in this world is free, but insurance providers and pharmaceutical companies do not need to charge as much for potentially life-saving medication. Nor should they be prescribing medication solely for their profit.

The trend seen with excessive prescriptions is also seen with excessive hospitalizations. A study by The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shows that 27% of men and 73% of women hospitalized for mental illness had substantially higher risk of suicide in the first 90 days after discharge. Those hospitalized for depression were 16 times more likely to commit suicide after hospitalization. Those who were not seen by outpatient care in the six months leading up to hospitalization were at even higher risk. Thus, hospitalization alone is not adequate care and often leaves patients even more vulnerable. Care does not stop at the hospital; it should continue at home. A hospital stay in any case can be life-changing and often traumatic, making individuals feel more alone, more helpless, more antagonized. Hospitalizations and medication are not the “quick fix” that society has been conditioned to so desperately want. The stigma that “all people with disorders are broken” is what causes doctors to try and “fix” something that is extremely difficult to understand. This misunderstanding caused the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to launch StigmaFree, a campaign suggesting educational, conscious language regarding mental health that encourages equality and shows compassion. (The key point here is that compassion does not mean complete understanding – just empathy.) Although I believe this is a great start, it is not nearly enough for systemic change. When I was diagnosed with a mix of mental disorders, I was told that I was an overthinker who became sad, but the extent of what I experienced was much greater than the labels ascribed by doctors who treated me. Experiences like this are why patients should be encouraged and given the tools of educating themselves; not only on pharmaceuticals, but on mental illness as well. Access to medication is important, but it should not replace understanding.

The Current Field of Psychiatry

These mistakes, along with the paper-ceiling hierarchy between psychiatrists and counselors, hurt patients. Researchers from John Hopkins University conducted a study that shows under-diagnosis and over-diagnosis go hand-in-hand. In fact, six out of seven participants did not meet the 12-month criteria to be diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Part of this overdiagnosis epidemic is the expansion of the DSM-V, the primary source of diagnostic criteria for mental disorders and illnesses. This expansion, although minorly contributed by the everchanging conceptions of mental illness within neuroscience and clinical psychology (which I completely understand and am studying to understand the human mind myself), is arguably due to the development of pharmaceutical drugs. These ever-changing conceptions do not, however, excuse ignorance on the part of patients nor professionals. If more people are diagnosed with mental disorders, more people buy the “necessary” drugs that are promoted by these large corporations. As more patients are diagnosed and prescribed medication, pharmaceutical companies profit more – even when those patients continue to suffer. Not only does medication generate profits for pharmaceutical companies, but it can also function as a form of social control. If someone is seen as acting out of what is seen as the “norm,” they are put on medicine to be stabilized. Yet the idea of being “stable” is subjective and depends heavily on individual and experience circumstances. Think of the extreme in the not so far in the future: if everyone is medicated to be normal in accordance with society, there is an erasure of individuality and culture as we know it – something straight out of a dystopian novel. Medication as the first prescribed solution is an attack on those who are deemed “irregular.”

Know What You Are Taking!

Medication can be necessary. If an individual is truly ill and a danger to themselves or others, intervention such as hospitalization or medicine is crucial. This is not a call to stop taking prescribed meds; I am simply saying that there is a lack of neuroscience comprehension within our society. When we are told how our mental illness is caused, we often get the “dumbed-down” version that is easier to digest and understand, usually meaning oversimplifying processes such as chemical imbalance. This is not mandating all of us to be neuroscientists – it is a call to educate yourself.

There is a systematic and cultural preference of speed rather than efficacy, putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. Doctors prioritize informed consent over helping patients understand what is happening in their own minds. In other words, many professionals think of mental patients as lab rats rather than humans who want to know why they cannot function like everyone else. Medication can save lives, but it can easily also cause harm. Those on medication should be able to make informed decisions on what we put in our system and how we choose to heal, rather than immediately spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year on “happy pills.” I am calling for transparency within clinical psychological, neuroscientific, and psychiatric fields. I implore – no, I beg you – educate yourself when your doctors will not. For people like me, do your research. Do what you feel is right for your body, for your mind. Do not let a broken, inefficient system push you towards a pill.

Works Cited:

“9 Ways to Fight Mental Health Stigma.” National Alliance on Mental Illness, www.nami.org/blog/9-ways-to-fight-mental-health-stigma.

Hedegaard, Holly, et al. “Antidepressant Use Among Adults: United States, 2015–2018.” National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief, no. 419, 2021, www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db419.htm.

Hedegaard, Holly, et al. “Use of Prescription Medication Among Adults Aged 18 and Over: United States.” National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief, no. 528, 2024, www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db528.htm.

Mojtabai, Ramin. “Depression: Over-Diagnosis and Over-Treatment.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2013, publichealth.jhu.edu/2013/mojtabai-depression-over-diagnosis-and-over-treatment.

Mojtabai, Ramin, et al. “National Trends in the Prevalence and Treatment of Depression in Adolescents and Young Adults.” Pediatrics, vol. 138, no. 6, 2016, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles.

Olfson, Mark, et al. “Continuity of Care and Suicide Risk After Psychiatric Hospital Discharge.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 168, no. 3, 2011, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles.

Olfson, Mark, et al. “Short-Term Suicide Risk After Psychiatric Hospital Discharge.” JAMA Psychiatry, vol. 74, no. 7, 2017, pp. 694–702.

“Public Opinion on Prescription Drugs and Their Prices.” KFF, www.kff.org/health-costs/public-opinion-on-prescription-drugs-and-their-prices.

“Suicide Statistics.” American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, afsp.org/suicide-statistics/.

“The Behavioral Health Care Affordability Problem.” Center for American Progress, www.americanprogress.org/article/the-behavioral-health-care-affordability-problem.

“A free speech conference? You’re just walking into a room of conservatives.”

My roommate said that when he heard I was flying to a conference hosted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the same organization that gave Davidson a D for its speech policies. The assumption wasn’t unusual. Not long ago, a reader told me that simply using the phrase “the free marketplace of ideas” made me sound like a conservative.

When I entered the conference room, the first student I noticed made me do a double-take. A glossy FIRE badge was clipped to her backpack, surrounded by other pins: BIPOC. Zohran for Mayor. By any definition, she was not a conservative.

She wasn’t the only one. Throughout the conference, I met students whose politics didn’t fit the stereotype my roommate had imagined.

“When I tell people I go to free speech conferences, they assume they’re conservative,” said Scott McKaughan, a student at the University of South Florida. “But they’re actually pretty nonpartisan. If anything, they usually lean left.”

Matthew Allaire, a senior at Macalester College who has attended several FIRE conferences, said the growing interest is largely a reaction to increasing political pressure on universities.

“I’ve been to several FIRE conferences in the past few years, and I’m seeing more students from elite institutions,” Allaire said. “That’s no mistake. The White House has singled out a lot of universities in its higher education reform agenda, and a lot of young people feel motivated to defend what they see as the bedrock principles of American democracy.”

Many of these students became interested in free speech well before Trump’s second term.

Ariona Cook, a junior at Duke University, traces her interest to the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “My small rural community in Kansas tried to organize a Black Lives Matter protest, and there was a lot of pushback,” she said. The protest was organized by community members, with the cooperation of the local police department, but tensions in the town remained high. Cook recalled that a couple that attended the demonstration were harassed at a bar later that night after being recognized.

Caroline Pope, a senior at the University of South Florida, entered the free speech movement long before college. As a high school journalist, she tried to write an opinion piece arguing that her school’s dress code was sexist. The article had already been approved by the student editor and faculty adviser when the principal intervened. Pope was called into the office and told the piece could not run because it would make the school “look bad,” and donors read the newspaper.

“I remember thinking, I’m being censored over an opinion piece in high school,” Pope said.

The experience sparked a lasting interest in student speech rights. Now at the University of South Florida, Pope serves as president of the Civic Discourse Club and works with FIRE to promote open debate on campus. In the wake of campus tensions following the October 7 attack, she says universities need stronger protections for expression — and more spaces where students feel comfortable voicing their convictions.

Samuel Conway, a Penn State student and former intern with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sees the challenge on his campus somewhat differently. At Penn State, he said, the obstacle is often less censorship than indifference.

“Penn State is a sort of bubble,” Conway said. “People aren’t necessarily concerned with the social and political things happening in the world.”

Conway said he was struck by the campus’s apolitical culture when he first arrived and set out to challenge it. For him, free speech advocacy is not just about protecting controversial ideas but encouraging students to engage with them. Universities, he argued, should be places for intellectual and political exploration, not merely pipelines into the workforce.

But for many of the students at the conference, apathy was only part of the problem. When students did become politically engaged, they often found themselves confronting a university culture uneasy with conflict itself.

Cook, the Duke junior, said that unease often appears in the form of administrative protest rules. At Duke, she said, university officials have adopted policies requiring demonstrations to be registered in advance and limiting disruptive protests. To her, that misses the point of political action. Demonstrations, she argued, are often meant to respond in real time to unfolding events, not to be folded neatly into an administrative process.

Allaire, the Macalester senior, sees the same tension on a broader scale. In the aftermath of the Gaza war and the congressional hearings that put university leaders under national scrutiny, he said, colleges have faced mounting pressure to reconcile competing demands: free expression, academic freedom, student safety, and political backlash from outside the university.

That pressure, he suggested, has only sharpened the stakes of campus speech debates.

“I believe in the ideals of the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of knowledge, and open inquiry,” Allaire said. “Those should be core missions of American higher learning. And every year it seems like we’re straying further from that.”

The pressures students described were not confined to one ideology. Jonathan McCartney, who began college at Colby before finishing his degree at the University of Florida, said that as a conservative student he often found himself on the receiving end of backlash. As a freshman writing opinion pieces for the student newspaper, he drew intense criticism for his views, including social media campaigns in which other students circulated material from his online history and denounced him as a fascist or white supremacist. What troubled him most, he said, was not simply that people disagreed, but that they seemed uninterested in arguing with what he had actually written.

Yet the conference itself, full of First Amendment advocates, offered a glimpse of the kind of debate many of the students wanted more often on their own campuses.

On the final night, long after the last panel had ended, clusters of students lingered in the hotel corridors arguing about politics. Among them were Cook and McCartney, who disagreed sharply on most issues and had supported different candidates in the 2024 election. As the hotel staff began ushering people out of the space, the two were still deep in discussion, debating California’s homelessness crisis and what governments should do about it.

The conversation was spirited but never hostile. There were no moderators, but neither interrupted the other. They listened closely to every point and continued long after everyone else had begun packing up.

Earlier in the conference, as we wandered through Disney World between panels, Scott McKaughan offered his own explanation for debates like that.

“The eternally radical idea is love your enemy,” McKaughan said. “Free speech is a manifestation of that in politics.”

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Romina Boccia is the director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute. She has been featured on CNBC, Fox News, and C-SPAN, and her research and commentary on federal spending, Social Security, and fiscal sustainability have been published in and cited by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg.

She recently spoke at Davidson College, where she gave a lecture to students in Dr. Katherine Bersch’s comparative politics class. She later sat down for an interview with Lux to discuss the misconceptions surrounding Social Security and why the program now faces mounting fiscal pressures.

Romina, you have described Social Security as a legal Ponzi scheme. Can you explain why?

There are a lot of misconceptions in the American public about what Social Security is and how it works. Cato polling from August 2025 showed that about a quarter of Americans think that Social Security is a private retirement account.

These myths arise from misleading terminology. We hear about a “trust fund” and “earned benefits,” which leads many people to think that they are contributing to their own retirement and later getting their money back with interest. That is not how the system works, although that is partially how it was sold.

Social Security operates more like a legal Ponzi scheme because benefits are paid out using money from new entrants rather than from real investment returns. When the program began, it paid benefits far in excess of what early beneficiaries had contributed. The example I like to give is the very first Social Security recipient, Ida Mae Fuller, who paid very little into the system and got about a 1,000-times return. By the end of her lifetime, she had collected the equivalent of roughly half a million dollars in Social Security benefits, while her total tax contribution in today’s dollars was closer to $23,000.

Why is Social Security less sustainable today than when it was created?

When Social Security was first implemented, there were roughly 50 workers paying taxes into Social Security for every one beneficiary collecting benefits. Today, that ratio is about 2.7 workers per beneficiary.

During that time, the tax rate has gone up significantly, from 2 percentage points of payroll or earned income to now 12.4%. But even at that much higher tax rate, the dollars coming into the system fall short of the benefits that have been promised.

Another major driver of that imbalance is demographic change. When Social Security was first implemented, far fewer Americans reached the eligibility age. Life expectancy in 1935 was about 64, while Social Security eligibility began at 65. Since then, life expectancy has grown by roughly 17 years, and life expectancy at age 65 has grown by about seven years. Today, the eligibility age has only gone up by roughly two years. And so you have more people collecting benefits for longer at a time when U.S. fertility rates have declined. So you have fewer workers now paying in than was the case in the past. Those factors together—the aging of the population, longer life expectancies, and the decline in fertility—have all contributed to the growing imbalance.

You’ve described Social Security as a failure of John Rawls’s veil of ignorance test. Who is advantaged, who is disadvantaged, and why?

Social Security represents an intergenerational transfer program. The way it works is that younger working Americans are taxed on their earned income through the so-called payroll tax, and then that money is redistributed to older Americans who are, in many cases, retired and eligible for Social Security benefits.

Now, usually when you have a redistributive transfer system that a government sets up, and if you have a fairly just government, you would redistribute money from wealthier individuals to poorer individuals. It’s a question of: What is the legitimacy behind the transfer? What justifies the government taking money from one group of people and giving it to another?

In many cases, that transfer is justified because some people need the money more than others. But in the case of Social Security, that moral legitimacy doesn’t really apply, because the money is collected from people who tend to have fewer assets and lower wealth, and then given to people who often have much higher assets and higher wealth. And so you have Social Security operating on the Robin Hood principle in reverse: taking from the poor to give to the rich.

So would it be better to just drop the pretense of a savings account and make it means-tested? Or perhaps something like a flat universal benefit?

I believe that we should stop talking about Social Security as if it were a retirement savings program. We should drop misleading terms like “the trust fund” or “earned benefit.” Even the name of the Social Security payroll tax is misleading. It’s called FICA, the Federal Insurance Contributions Act.

All of those terms mislead people about the true nature of Social Security, which, if you look under the hood of the program, is really just a wealth transfer scheme. There’s no savings. There are no real assets in the so-called trust fund. There are no contributions. There are taxes paid and benefits received.

In that sense, Social Security functions similarly to food stamps or other government welfare programs. The only difference is that people think about it differently because of political rhetoric and a comforting lie they’ve been told their entire lives about what the system is, compared to how it actually works. So, yes, I believe we should be honest with the American people about how the program functions. And in light of that discussion, we should also consider who benefits should be for. What should the purpose of Social Security be?

It shouldn’t be income replacement regardless of need, because we can’t afford that anymore. It should be, if anything, poverty prevention for seniors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to provide for themselves, in order to reduce distortions in American saving behavior. Social Security could adopt a universal benefit that wouldn’t be means-tested. You would basically just give everyone the same benefit, which would also be more fiscally affordable than the current structure. You could means-test a benefit, but the tradeoff is that people will come up with elaborate ways to hide assets so they can qualify for the means-tested benefit in old age. You don’t want to discourage people from saving and investing, which are good things to do. Unfortunately, those are some of the side effects of having a means-tested versus a more universal old-age benefit.

What if Social Security were structured as a true savings account?

You could look to Australia, which for many Americans has been a model for what a government-mandated, defined-contribution savings account could look like. Australia is interesting because they also have roughly a 12% contribution to retirement savings. But unlike in the United States, where Social Security’s 12% payroll tax is just a pure transfer, the way it works in Australia is that workers’ contributions are actually invested in the stock market for the worker.

It’s like an American-style 401(k), except 401(k)s or IRAs in the United States are voluntary. The Australian superannuation is mandatory. And that’s the key difference.

If you look at American voluntary savings behavior, when people actually have a choice about how much to put into their 401(k)s or IRAs and they’re not forced to, you find that younger workers tend to be less focused on retirement savings, as they should be, and more focused on other investments. Some invest in education, some start businesses, and some borrow to buy or build homes to raise their families. As Americans reach their peak earning years, their retirement savings go up. This tends to be the case around ages 40 to 60, which is why our system allows for so-called catch-up contributions.

I think one of the downfalls of having a mandatory defined-contribution system like Australia’s is that you’re taking away people’s choice about when to save and how much to save, which can actually make younger people worse off by taking away money they could use in better ways.

That said, if you’re comparing it to U.S. Social Security, you could say it’s superior, because at the very least it’s not just a pure income transfer. The Australian system is actually a retirement savings account. People’s income is forcibly saved and then gets to grow. And so Australians often end up with higher income in retirement from superannuation than Americans generally receive from Social Security, depending on income level.

The key difference is that Social Security is redistributive, from workers to seniors, generally from lower-income earners to higher-income earners, although some of that is changing. Australia, by contrast, is contributive. It’s mandatory, but it’s a contribution system.

My favorite system combines the best of two worlds. It would provide a predictable basic benefit, like New Zealand does, where everyone gets the same amount. You know how much you can expect from the government, which then tells you how much you should be saving on top to meet your personal preferences for the living standards you’d like to enjoy in old age.

And then New Zealand makes it simple and easy for people to save in private accounts through automatic enrollment. There you get at the concern that some people will be too short-sighted and won’t be saving for retirement. Many people argue that therefore we have to force them, but if you look at automatic enrollment, that’s one nudge you can use where people can opt out. People who are too lazy to opt in will often also be too lazy to opt out. So you capture that population without reducing individual autonomy for those who want more control over their own income and savings.

What reforms would actually make Social Security sustainable?

We have to get at that question from two angles. One is how do we get it done politically, because that’s really the bigger issue. And then two is what reforms would actually make a difference. That depends on your preferences about how much redistribution you think government should be doing and how much economic growth you want to prioritize.

So first, how do we get it done politically? Given the political nature of Social Security and all the misconceptions people have about how the program works, we will most likely need to rely on an expert commission. This is not something Congress is willing to tackle directly, because the incentives are against it. Members of Congress want to be reelected, and if you poll people on tax increases or benefit reductions, both are unpopular. So politicians find themselves between a rock and a hard place, and their choice has been to do nothing. But if Congress delegates responsibility to an independent commission, that can give politicians the necessary political cover to implement economically necessary reforms, while allowing them to point to the commission rather than take the full political fallout themselves.

Then there’s the question of what should actually be done. You have two primary levers. You can reduce benefits to close the imbalance, or you can raise taxes. And so the question becomes: what is the most equitable approach, and what is most conducive to economic growth? People will have different preferences.

For example, European countries tend to have more expensive welfare states that are primarily funded by lower- and middle-income taxpayers through consumption taxes. In the United States, we currently have a very progressive tax system, but there’s a limit to how much you can tax upper-income earners if you’re unwilling to tax lower- and middle-income earners. Right now, the top 10 percent of income earners pay about 70 percent of the entire income tax burden.

Things change when you look at payroll taxes because they actually affect lower-income taxpayers. But some of the top proposals that are most politically popular right now for fixing Social Security would actually try to raise taxes more on higher income earners. One of them is about lifting the payroll tax cap, because right now, about $189,000 in annual income are subject to payroll taxes, but also people’s benefits are based on that payroll tax cap. And so there’s a maximum benefit that some of the highest earners can collect, in 2025, that’s roughly $62,000 annually for an individual.

But if you eliminate the payroll tax cap and tax all earned income, you immediately raise another question: do you give higher-income earners credit for those additional tax contributions? If you do, you could end up paying a top earner a $200,000 annual benefit. Is that really something the government should be doing, especially given our fiscal situation? If instead you raise taxes on higher-income earners without increasing their benefits, then you fundamentally alter the nature of the program. And if we’re willing to go that far and delink benefits from earnings and contributions, then why not ask a more substantive, foundational question: who actually needs Social Security, and what is the most economically efficient way to provide a needs-based benefit?

Lifting the payroll tax cap also comes with real tradeoff costs. In high-tax states like New York and California, marginal tax rates for top earners could rise above 60 percent, meaning every additional dollar earned would face a 60-cent tax. That changes behavior. People work less, invest less in their own human capital, and we all end up with lower innovation and slower economic growth as a result. That’s not very economically efficient, especially for the purpose of paying outsized benefits to the highest-income earners. What’s the point?

Instead, if we focus on what the program should justifiably do—perhaps keeping seniors out of poverty—we can then ask how to achieve that goal at the lowest cost. Those are the questions we should be raising, rather than making incremental tweaks that often don’t make sense once you’re clear about the end goal. Why would we be giving a $200,000 annual benefit to someone with millions, or even billions, of dollars in assets? And even today, why are we paying $62,000 annual benefits to millionaires, including people like President Trump, who is also eligible for Social Security? The system doesn’t make sense. I think we need to look more fundamentally at what the system should do, and then how we should finance it.

How could Congress realistically create a fiscal commission given opposition from groups like the AARP?

That has actually already happened. In 2024, Congress considered a bipartisan fiscal commission, and it was voted out favorably from the House Budget Committee but never came to the House floor because special interest groups, including the AARP, opposed it.

The way for Congress to overcome those political pressures will likely be in the face of a more severe crisis. And that crisis is coming. It could be imposed externally if bondholders demand much higher interest rates to continue lending to the U.S. government, triggering a fiscal crisis that gives politicians both the motivation and the political cover to put an effective commission in place.

Or it could come from legal and statutory deadlines. In the early 2030s—2032 for Social Security and 2034 under current projections for Medicare—Congress will be forced to act, or the default will be automatic benefit cuts. If lawmakers are confronted with the prospect of their constituents facing a 24 percent Social Security benefit cut and an 11 percent cut to Medicare’s hospital benefits, which would limit access to care, they will likely look for other options.

How do you prevent a fiscal commission from being captured by institutional or political incentives?

I’ve been an advocate for a fiscal commission modeled after the successful Base Realignment and Closure Commission. One problem with these kinds of institutions is that they can get hijacked if they stick around for too long. So one important safeguard is to make the commission temporary and give it a very specific goal that it has to achieve.

Another safeguard is oversight. You have congressional watchdogs like the Government Accountability Office that can verify whether the commission’s recommendations fall within the bounds Congress set and whether those proposals actually achieve the fiscal goals Congress established.

Personnel selection also matters. You have to nominate the right people, and a system of checks and balances, such as Senate confirmation, helps ensure that compromise is built into the process. That makes it harder for either party to stack the commission with people who would undermine its purpose or push proposals that wouldn’t be palatable to the American public.

The commission should also be designed to dissolve. Once its goal is achieved, it should discontinue, or be placed on a timer so that even if it fails, it is automatically dissolved. The longer powerful institutions like this exist, the more likely they are to lose their independence over time.

And finally you have external organizations, ideally nonpartisan, that serve Congress and the American people like the Government Accountability Office. They can monitor the commission’s proceedings and review its recommendations before they go into effect to confirm that the commission did what Congress tasked it to do.

You just spoke to a class of Davidson students. What is the main takeaway you want them to leave with?

The federal budget and our national debt aren’t abstract issues that only happen in Washington. Our constitutional republic depends on an active, informed, and involved citizenry to provide real checks and balances on politicians. We all stand to gain or lose from how Congress chooses to address the growing debt crisis, which is driven in large part by unsustainable entitlement programs that provide significant benefits to some of the wealthiest people in the country.

If you look at the federal budget, about 45 cents of every dollar Congress spends goes toward benefits for people aged 65 and older, even though they make up roughly 18 percent of the population. As that population grows, so does its share of federal spending. By 2030, about half of all federal spending is projected to benefit this group.

Individuals aged 65 and older tend to have both the financial resources and the time to be politically involved, and the federal budget reflects that reality. They are disproportionately more likely to vote than younger people, with more than two-thirds of people in that age group voting compared to roughly one-third of people aged 35 and under. They have more time to attend town halls, they know who their representatives are, and they regularly contact them through phone calls, emails, and letters. Seniors also participate in powerful political organizations like the AARP, which organizes on a grassroots level to preserve Social Security and Medicare benefits, and they are more likely to donate to political campaigns because they have had more time to accumulate assets and deploy them in the political system. As a result, policymakers tend to hear primarily from people on the receiving end of these benefits, rather than from the taxpayers who are paying for them

It is important that students, who have the highest stake in this debate, become more informed about how decisions made in Washington affect their lives, their economic opportunities, and how much money they will ultimately have in their bank accounts. They also need to become more involved and make their voices heard using the tools available in our political system, not just through voting, but by contacting their members of Congress. That can mean writing letters, sending emails, or making phone calls. Politicians are representatives, and they exist to represent the people. Right now, they are mostly hearing from those on the receiving end of these benefits. They also need to hear from the taxpayers who are paying for them.

Editor’s note: Boccia also publishes regular analysis of fiscal policy and entitlement reform through her Substack, The Debt Dispatch, which is widely read by policymakers and congressional staff.

On December 31, 2025, enhanced Premium Tax Credits (ePTCs) officially expired, eliminating $0 health insurance premiums for low-income earners and restoring the subsidy cliff: as of January 1, 2026, anyone earning even $1 over 400% of the federal poverty line ($62,600 for individuals) is responsible for the full sticker price.

ePTCs were introduced by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and extended by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) so that no one had to pay more than 8.5% of their income for the silver benchmark plan. As a result, Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace enrollment grew from 12 million in 2021 to 24.3 million in 2025, while net premium costs fell by 44% on average. Ironically, the Republican states of Texas and Florida that fought hardest against the ACA were the largest beneficiaries of IRA subsidies, receiving $1.5 and $2.2 billion in 2024 respectively.

According to the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, the expiration of ePTCs will cause net premiums to roughly double for people earning over 250% of the poverty line and quadruple for those earning less. An estimated 4.8 million people will lose health insurance in 2026. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy group, projects a $40.7 billion drop in GDP and loss of 340,000 jobs, disproportionately affecting Texas and Florida.

On September 19, 2025, Senate Democrats took advantage of the 60-vote filibuster threshold to block H.R. 5371, demanding that any bill to fund the government include an extension of enhanced subsidies. Republicans refused to compromise, triggering a government shutdown beginning on October 1 that would become the longest in US history. However, when the 43-day duration began to disrupt federal food assistance programs and airport operations, eight moderate Democratic senators agreed to a short-term funding bill that crucially did not extend ePTCs.

The Republican Party opposed the extension on the grounds that it would increase the deficit by $350 billion over ten years, function as a subsidy for insurance company profits, and provide little patient value. On the other hand, the deficit cost would manifest itself in higher hospital bills for everyone else to cover the costs of emergency care for uninsured patients, while the ACA’s 80/20 Rule requires insurers to spend at least 80-85% of premiums on medical care. Furthermore, people who decide against purchasing health insurance are not doing so because they do not value it, but because they are priced out. The United States has the highest health care costs in the world, and coverage can quite literally be the difference between life and death.

In light of the expired ePTCs, the Trump administration has proposed a “Great Healthcare Plan” that seeks to lower health care costs. On February 3, the president signed H.R. 7148, which implemented part of the plan by removing perverse incentives for pharmacy benefit managers to drive up drug prices, requiring hospitals to use unique National Provider Identifiers (NPIs) for off-campus outpatient clinics to ensure site-neutral payments, and codifying most-favored-nation (MFN) deals so that the US pays the same prices as other developed nations for certain prescription drugs.

While these policies are a step in the right direction, the bigger question is what will replace the enhanced subsidies. Republican Senators Rick Scott and Bill Cassidy propose depositing the $350 billion earmarked for ePTCs directly into Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) that individuals can use to pay for health care. However, an HSA deposit of $1000-1500 would do little for people like Adrian Pitts, a 57-year-old small business owner and North Carolina resident who just saw his monthly premium rise from $1000 to $2670 and is now considering bankruptcy insurance. Meanwhile, HSAs will incentivize healthy people to choose cheaper Bronze plans, leaving a sicker, higher-risk population in the more comprehensive Silver and Gold tiers. This adverse selection threatens even higher premiums for those who need coverage the most.

Fundamentally, the debate over ePTCs and HSAs misses the forest for the trees. By treating health care as a commodity instead of a right, the United States is not saving money; it is merely shifting the cost. When millions like Adrian Pitts are priced out of preventative care, they inevitably return to the system via the emergency room, where we pay twelve times the cost of a doctor’s visit to stabilize crises that could have been avoided entirely.

Political activism at Davidson is undergoing a significant transformation. Within the past year, the College has seen the emergence of new partisan organizations such as Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) that do not receive funding from the Student Activities Office. Their arrival reflects a growing fragmentation among partisan coalitions, particularly amongst conservative students.

This fragmentation, however, is no longer confined to the political right. In recent weeks, it has been further compounded by the formation of the Davidson chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (DC-YDSA). According to its constitution, the organization’s mission is to “articulate and defend the idea that true human liberation is impossible under capitalism.” In doing so, the DC-YDSA introduces a new ideological strand into a campus long dominated by the Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians.

Following in the footsteps of TPUSA, the DC-YDSA neither aims to receive monetary funding from Davidson College nor wants to fall within the registration of the Center for Political Engagement (CPE), the entity that presently houses the Davidson Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians. Instead, DC-YDSA will source its funding from the national organization.

For DC-YDSA president Carter Ratcliff ‘27, this decision stems from a desire for autonomy. “While the CPE does not govern political organizations on campus, we still wanted a greater degree of independence and separation from the college, especially given the current political climate,” Ratcliff said. “This protects both us and the college, and further opens the door for us to opportunities such as endorsing political candidates in the future.”

Ratcliff emphasized that alternate funding does not preclude the DC-YDSA from cooperating with other groups on campus. “The organization is premised upon three critical pillars: community-building, political education, and social service,” Ratcliff explained, pointing to a YDSA project in Charlotte that involved building benches at bus stops for people to rest as an example of the group’s approach.

“By maintaining consensus on certain foundational principles, we aim to work with other groups towards political aims and community well-being.” This sentiment echoes comments provided by other political organizations, such as the Davidson College Democrats, alongside non-partisan entities such as the CPE.

The spirit of cooperation, however, is tempered by political realities. Ratcliff notes that partnering with the DC-YDSA would be a considerably difficult proposition to consider for other groups due to its socialist nature. The issue is further compounded by the opinion provided by Alexa Cohen ‘27, President of the Davidson College Republicans: “I am not sure if cooperation would necessarily be possible owing to ideological differences; I am also uncertain if [DC-YDSA] would want to engage with any event we would be interested in hosting.”

She claims that the ideological gulf between the Republicans and the DC-YDSA, which she considers to be a far-left organization, would make cooperation very difficult. She further contrasts it with her group’s interactions with the Davidson College Democrats, claiming that they, despite different policy prescriptions, “have a lot in common.”

Cohen further suggested that Davidson’s political landscape may be fragmenting into what she described as a “Europe-styled multiparty political system”, in which multiple organizations occupy narrower ideological lanes. Even so, she argued that these entities are coalescing into broader political factions of “left” and “right” that operate on their own respective lines.

For the political left, Cohen speculated that any alliance-building between the Democrats and the DC-YDSA would be in response to the recent resurgence of conservative organizations such as Turning Point USA and Young Americans for Freedom. If this is the case, such polarisation risks undermining prospects for cross-group cooperation on campus, as political interactions will become more adversarial in nature and less focused on shared interests.

Yet even within these broader factions, ideological unity is far from guaranteed. That reality was made evident during Turning Point USA’s “Prove Me Wrong” event held last semester, where divisions within conservative student politics surfaced publicly. Among the students who challenged TPUSA president Oliver Genovese ’28 was Cohen herself, who debated him over legal immigration.

They disagreed on the restrictions of immigrants from what Cohen called “target” countries, with Cohen arguing that such restrictions were needed to prevent immigration from “populations that are extremely anti-western, anti-American.” Genovese disagreed on the restriction, stating that “people who come to the U.S. generally align with our ideals” and therefore we should “give people the chance to come to the U.S.”

The fact that these differences were unveiled at TPUSA’s “Prove Me Wrong” debate event in an argument between the organization’s leader and the president of the College Republicans shows that organized politics on our campus is fragmenting.

As for DC-YDSA’s interactions with organizations like TPUSA and YAF, it is natural to assume that these will be fraught with tension. Unlike the umbrella-like structure of the Democrats and the Republicans, which permits different ideological dispositions within the same organization and facilitates outside cooperation, the same cannot be said for these revisionist partisan groups, which hold directly opposite views of democratic socialism and limited government with free market capitalism. This polarization would pose a great impediment to collaboration at Davidson.

Even so, cooperation amongst these organizations is not impossible. Davidson’s partisan groups can navigate this polarized environment through mediators such as the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, which has previously worked with political organizations on campus. Furthermore, it is important to account for the positions of individual leaders within these organizations.

Oliver Genovese ‘28, the President for TPUSA’s Davidson chapter, argues that collaboration on issues such as civic discourse can be made by all parties concerned, regardless of ideological affiliation. Reflecting upon his attempts to coordinate a debate event with the Davidson College Democrats ahead of the midterm elections, Genovese welcomes YDSA’s participation in the exercise, “I attempt to look beyond the political affiliation for the dignity of the human being….if the YDSA wants to participate, I would be more than happy to have them there. The more opinions there are, the better.”

If nothing else, perhaps the spirit of multipartisanship might be found in something as fundamental as community service, which is something Genovese thinks TPUSA can work with the YDSA on, provided any explicit socialist connotations are kept out of the event programming. “I mean, if it’s a community event [YDSA] wants to do, it’s good for the community, and it’s not something that’s purely socialist; that’s good for the community, I’m fine working with them.”

Despite ideological polarization on the national stage, Davidson today sees a more unique process of political fragmentation on its campus. Partisanship at this college stands at an evolutionary crossroads. As to the nature of what course it takes, that is something which the members and leaders of our institution’s partisan organizations will decide: the ball is firmly in their court.

Yesterday, The Atlantic published an essay arguing that liberal arts colleges have been relatively resilient amid the recent turmoil in higher education. As universities confront the rise of generative AI and increased political pressure from the Trump administration, the essay contends that the liberal arts model may be better positioned to withstand these challenges than large research institutions.

The writer, Ian Bogost, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, visited “four elite liberal arts colleges” during the fall admissions cycle, including Amherst, Vassar, Smith, and Davidson. Bogost joined prospective students on campus tours, sat in on classes, and talked with students, faculty, and administrators about the issues currently facing higher education. Writing from his position at a major research university, Bogost contrasted what he observed at these campuses with dynamics he said he rarely encounters at large universities.

Bogost’s primary observation is that small colleges have far less to lose from the administration’s threat to pull federal funds. While Davidson receives roughly $5 million in federal research grants, that figure pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions flowing into major research universities.

However, Bogost warns that this insulation is fragile. While Davidson’s low reliance on federal grants staves off immediate leverage, broader legislative threats are mounting—specifically the 2025 increase in the endowment tax from 1.4% to 8%. Although schools with fewer than 3,000 students are currently exempt from the increase, the shifting political climate suggests this carve-out may not last. As a leading liberal arts college in the South, Davidson remains a likely symbolic target for the administration’s “war on higher ed.”

Bogost specifically highlighted Davidson as a counterexample to conservatives’ claims that elite colleges function as political “echo chambers.” He saw the college as comparatively effective at navigating political polarization, noting that it physically sits on the county line between heavily Democratic Mecklenburg County and heavily Republican Iredell County. Bogost suggested that this geographic divide is reflected in campus life, pointing to Davidson’s creation of the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative in 2019 as an effort to encourage structured dialogue across political differences.

Bogost also suggested that Davidson may be better positioned than many larger universities to confront challenges posed by generative AI. He pointed to the college’s honor code and small class sizes, which he said encourage students to internalize expectations around academic integrity and discuss appropriate AI use with peers, rather than rely solely on enforcement by professors. Bogost argued that the resulting uncertainty and debate around AI use reflect a level of student investment that is often absent at larger institutions. He described this struggle to understand the technology as a necessary precursor to developing more effective AI policy.

The Lux reached out to President Douglas Hicks for comment on Davidson’s inclusion in the piece.

“I’m delighted that The Atlantic highlighted the work we do here at Davidson to prepare our students for lives of leadership and service and to foster a culture of mutual respect. The article emphasized that Davidson and the other colleges that were featured might be small but make a large and transformative impact in the world. I’m proud to be included in the story with our colleagues at Amherst, Smith, and Vassar.”

Today, assessments are administered differently. Monitoring has replaced discretion, and precaution has replaced assumption. Whatever its moral standing once was, the Honor Code no longer governs how exams actually work. The result is a system that frustrates everyone, even though no single person decided to build it.

Ironically, the clearest explanation for this came from my economics professor: game theory. The idea is simple. People make choices that depend on what they expect others to do. A choice is never just a choice. It is mutual guessing dressed up as decision-making.

To illustrate this, my professor used the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two people are arrested. Each must choose whether to stay silent or confess. Cooperation produces the best joint outcome, but the rational individual’s move is to confess, because neither prisoner can trust the other.

The same logic now governs take-home exams at Davidson. The two players are the professor and their students. The professor can allow take-home exams or require the testing center. If the professor allows take-home exams, students gain convenience and professors avoid surveillance. But cheating becomes possible. If the professor uses the testing center, no one cheats, but every student bears the cost of coordination, scheduling, and stress. If the professor’s primary goal is to minimize cheating, the rational move is surveillance, even if it leaves everyone worse off than the trust-based system it replaced.

When a student asked how trust affects efficiency, my professor answered without hesitation: “The absence of trust is a cost to all of us.” The statement is general, but its implications are specific. Without trust, the cooperative option disappears. When professors cannot rely on students, surveillance replaces discretion. That surveillance then creates its own costs: administrative, logistical, and psychological.

The timeline is straightforward. Low trust leads to surveillance. Surveillance consumes time. Time cuts into teaching. Defensive behavior follows on both sides. The new equilibrium sustains itself.

In our class alone, we now take four major tests in the testing center and around 15 quizzes in the classroom. These quizzes often consume 30 of the 50 minutes of class time. Sometimes the entire period is lost. Just the quizzes totaled 450 minutes of class time across the semester, the equivalent of nine full class sessions that could have been used for instruction.

Davidson’s tuition is roughly $73,000 a year, which means each class costs about $9,000 in pure tuition. A standard class meets for about 2,250 minutes per semester. Our course spent 450 of those minutes on quizzes, or 20% percent of its instructional time. That is the equivalent of spending roughly $1,800 of tuition on administrative assessment rather than teaching.

The testing center adds its own layer of inefficiency. Professors forget to send tests, students miss time slots, and the schedule backs up. When I took my exam, it was the final day before Thanksgiving break, and almost every seat was filled. The environment is more stressful, especially for students who need accommodations, which can already be difficult to secure at Davidson. The clicking of pens, the squeaking of shoes, and the metallic clinks of water bottles make it harder to concentrate. Before this shift, a student could take an exam in an empty classroom and avoid these conditions entirely. Now, silence and focus are traded for noise and coordination.

The same dynamic appears outside of testing. Professors increasingly distrust students in group work, so projects now require check-ins, progress logs, and evidence that no one is free-riding. Once a few students defect, everyone is treated as if they might. The Prisoner’s Dilemma returns in miniature: nobody chooses the system, but everybody participates in it.

The relevant point is simple: it is implausible that students today are morally weaker than students five or ten years ago. Human character does not decay that quickly. The class of 2026 was not born with worse morals than the class of 2016. What changes is the environment. The expectations. The culture. When people believe others will cheat, they protect themselves. When they are treated as if they cannot be trusted, they act defensively. Fear becomes the new baseline expectation, and like any feedback loop, the low-trust equilibrium sustains itself.

At some point, genuine learning becomes secondary to its policing. A surprising share of an instructor’s time is now spent watching for defection: walking up and down rows, monitoring glances, and later reviewing assignments for AI use. When professors begin to view students as defectors, students view professors the same way. The shift does not arrive through one large decision, but through many small ones.

Game theory makes the logic blunt. When trust is high, cooperation is rational. When trust is low, defection is rational. Davidson once felt like a cooperative setting. Now it leans toward defection. Shared expectations have been replaced by proctoring, testing centers, and administrative controls. The institution did not choose this end state outright. It arrived there through small, local decisions that accumulated into a system.

Both sides now defect. Professors assume the worst; students respond in kind, and eventually the assumption becomes true. But if trust can disappear through small decisions, it can return the same way, not through a policy announcement, but through quiet choices to cooperate even when defection is available. Distrust wastes more than time. It diminishes the education itself. If trust ever returns, it will not arrive with ceremony. It will look like a professor handing out an exam and walking out of the room, and students choosing not to take advantage. That is how cooperation is built: one move, then another, until the high-trust equilibrium reappears.

Others weren’t as lucky. O’Leary recalled business owners returning to find nothing left. “The building’s gone — everything in it’s gone,” he said. “Their whole life is just washed away.”

The flood destroyed 45 buildings, including nearly a third of the town’s businesses. Most business owners lacked flood insurance, leaving many with no option but to leave in the aftermath.

After the flood, Chimney Rock was largely inaccessible. The main road into town had been washed away, forcing recovery crews to enter on foot before temporary roads could be built. For the following months, crews worked on debris removal and utility repairs. With access now available, many residents and businesses returned, though others were left deciding whether rebuilding was possible at all.

Since then, the town adopted a long-term recovery plan called Raise the Rock. Developed with outside planners and local officials, the plan aims to redesign Chimney Rock with future flood risk in mind.

As part of broader recovery efforts across Western North Carolina, Dr. Matt Fox, Director of Social and Sustainable Innovation and Entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University, spent time in the region at the start of 2025 identifying needs related to innovation and entrepreneurship. Knowing his program could not support every community on its own, he reached out to other colleges and universities across the state, including Davidson.

“As part of a larger initiative started by Dr. Fox, the Davidson College Consulting Group is working with small businesses in Chimney Rock,” said Amy Tirpak, the consulting operations manager at the Hurt Hub. She emphasized that Davidson’s involvement is part of a broader effort, with students from Campbell University, Wake Forest, and East Carolina University also working across Western North Carolina.

The Davidson College Consulting Group is a program managed by the Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and is made up of about 30 students who take on short-term projects for startups and small businesses. Services include website creation, market research, data analysis, graphic design, and other digital services.

This past fall semester the group completed seven projects for businesses in Chimney Rock, including market research, data analysis, website creation, website performance audits, brand voice development, and the creation of a retail product line. One project analyzed visitor data from Chimney Rock State Park to better understand who was visiting after the town reopened last summer. The findings helped inform marketing campaigns coordinated with the county tourism board.

Building on that work, the group will complete four additional projects this spring, including financial modeling, data analysis, growth strategy, and website creation.

To better understand the needs of the businesses they were supporting, students traveled to Chimney Rock. Entering the town, foundations had been wiped away and piles of rubble were scattered across the riverbank. In spite of the destruction, shops were open, and visitors stopped for lunch at the local smokehouse. Now, over a year after the flood, the town carried a sense of normalcy.

During the visit, students met with business owners, listening to their stories and learning how they had been trying to get back on their feet.

“I thought it was important for us to see the devastation in person,” said Tirpak. She noted that while images and videos circulate online, it’s different when you’re actually standing at the edge of a drop-off where a building once stood. “When you’re face to face with a business owner who’s lost everything, it’s different than just reading about it in an article.”

Mayor Peter O’Leary welcomed the partnership. “It’s very encouraging to see universities and colleges like Davidson reach out and offer their assistance,” he said. “We don’t need people to come in and do the labor, but a lot of us need help with marketing, with internet, and strategic planning.”

Sixteen months after the flood, Chimney Rock is hopeful and working toward full restoration in the years ahead. “It’s been hard trying to get motivated to rebuild and restart,” O’Leary said. “But we’ve had tremendous support from customers, people in the area, and people all over the country.”

Learn more about the Raise the Rock initiative here