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.

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.

“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.”

This year, Chief Justice John Roberts devoted the opening section of his report to Thomas Paine. This is a notable choice, considering one might expect a traditional justice to focus on the more familiar figures of the founding, such as Washington or Jefferson. Instead, Roberts tells the story of Paine, a struggling English immigrant who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 nearly penniless, relied on a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, and soon became one of the most influential political writers in American history. Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, Roberts notes, adopted plain, direct language in place of legal jargon, effectively democratizing political argument and advancing the idea that government exists to serve the people rather than rule them.

Unlike founders like Madison, Paine was not a cautious constitutional designer or a member of the colonial elite. Rather, he was something of a political radical in his belief in the natural rights of every human and in his outspoken criticism of monarchy and slavery. By foregrounding Paine rather than more conventional founders, Roberts is offering a particularly deliberate interpretation of what the American project was meant to be.

That interpretation arrives at a moment when the meaning of the founding is increasingly contested. On the ideological left, the 1619 Project frames the Declaration of Independence as a document designed primarily to protect slavery and white supremacy. On the right, a growing movement argues that the founding was flawed because it prioritized individual rights over moral authority, religion, and social cohesion. Both perspectives, in different ways, reject the founding as morally authoritative, instead turning toward alternative frameworks grounded in class and racial structure or in classical notions of virtue and the “good society.”

Roberts does not address either camp directly. Instead, he builds a different story around Paine and the Declaration of Independence. Roberts, notably, remarks that the American mantra of unbridled individual freedom present in the Declaration was more aspirational than descriptive, given that a substantial number of its signers participated in the system of slavery. Yet the importance of the Declaration, as Roberts insists, is that it articulated an ideal that could be invoked by later generations even when it was not yet enforced.

To make that point, he draws heavily on Abraham Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration. Lincoln argued that the phrase “all men are created equal” was written not because it was already true, but so that it could serve as a standard against which future laws and institutions could be judged. In that sense, the Declaration functioned less as a description of the country as it existed and more as a statement of an ideal to be reached.

Here, Roberts’s account takes a turn that is often associated more with liberal constitutional thought than with conservative jurisprudence. He traces a line from the Declaration to Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. Each, in different ways, appealed to the Declaration’s promise of equality to challenge laws and institutions that denied it. Rather than treating these figures as critics of the founding, Roberts presents them as participants in its unfinished project.

Just as important as what Roberts includes, however, is what he leaves out. His account contains little of what has defined conservative legal rhetoric for much of the past century. There is no emphasis on gun rights, limited government, or originalist constraint, and no defense of tradition for its own sake. Instead, the report closes with a call for all three branches of government to work together, across time, to bring American law into closer alignment with the principles of the Declaration.

That framing is especially striking at a moment when both Congress and the Supreme Court have been criticized for failing to serve as meaningful checks on the executive branch. Roberts’s insistence on institutional balance and shared responsibility reads less like a neutral historical reflection and more like a quiet reminder of what constitutional government is meant to be.

In a year marking the 250th anniversary of the American founding, Roberts’s report offers a sobering counterpoint to the Trump administration’s plans to host a UFC event on the White House lawn on June 14, partly to commemorate the founding and partly to celebrate the president’s own birthday. Increasingly, anniversaries of this magnitude are defined by celebration-driven spectacle rather than reflection. This exclusive focus on pageantry leaves little room to ask what it actually means to be an American, or what the founders were trying to create. That is what makes Roberts’s focus on the rebels of the American story so striking. Appointed by George W. Bush, who once described him as a man of decency and a kind heart, Roberts now seems either uniquely well-suited to this moment or unexpectedly shaped by it.

Thomas Paine, in this telling, is a symbol not just of the founding but of America’s pathway of hope and opportunity. He arrived poor, made his way into public life, and helped give a restless collection of colonies a political identity. Roberts’s report uses Paine to make the claim that the United States was not founded as a closed ethnic or religious community, nor as a finished moral order, but as an argument that human beings are born with rights and that governments exist to secure them. Two hundred and fifty years later, that argument remains unresolved.

Refounded in 2024, Sundial revived a campus magazine first established in 1910—the very publication where a young Barack Obama (Columbia ‘83) once wrote about the “twisted logic” of Cold War thinking.

Tired of ideological uniformity in campus discourse, Sundial seeks “to challenge readers with perspectives and ideas they haven’t heard before.” Their main goal: “to get you thinking.”

“We have both communists and MAGA in our staff,” Nagin told us with a grin. “We don’t just check ideological boxes—we challenge each other with principled arguments.”

In our meeting with Sundial, we talked about the struggle of building something from nothing—no funding, no precedent, and no assurance that anyone would care to read. Yet their beginnings were even shakier than ours. Students went out of their way to hide or even throw away their magazines.

We talked about lighter things, too. He laughed when I told him one student thought we were an “alt-right newspaper.” I nearly choked on my coffee when he explained their article that used readability tests and machine learning methods to prove their university presidents’ emails were statistically terrible. I guess that’s what Ivy League students do in their free time.

Our main takeaway, though, was direction—what it means to have a voice that’s actually heard. Sundial’s writers understand their privilege: at Columbia, their work reaches national eyes. Their problem isn’t being heard—it’s protecting the freedom to keep speaking amid the noise.

Davidson’s challenge is different. We’re not fighting to protect a national spotlight; we’re building one of our own. Our influence may be regional, but that makes it tangible. When we write, we speak to our peers, our community, and our corner of the country. If we do it well, our voice can echo far beyond campus walls. We can stand as a paragon of free speech—where diverse opinions clash, reason prevails, and the earnest pursuit of truth remains our highest calling.

Already in the preamble of Davidson’s constitution, later reinstated and further expanded in our Commitment to Freedom of Expression, we see this mission outlined:

“Davidson dedicates itself to the quest for truth and encourages teachers and students to explore the whole of reality, whether physical or spiritual, with unlimited employment of their intellectual powers… Davidson… intends to teach all students to think clearly, to make relevant judgments, to discriminate among values, and to communicate freely with others in the realm of ideas.”

And we have the institutional foundations to support it: a serious and old Honor Code, programs like the Institute for Public Good, and a liberal-arts education that trains us to read closely, argue fairly, and change our minds when reason demands it. Those habits matter more than slogans.

As a liberal-arts college, we hold a rare advantage. Our students think across disciplines, finding complexity where others see certainty. Every subject stretches a different muscle of the mind. This breadth refines judgment and deepens reflection, making the pursuit of truth not just freer, but richer.

Davidson already nurtures the seeds of greatness in its institutions and great community that support us. The question is whether we, the students, are ready to live up to it.

If we keep writing—if we keep turning conviction into words that provoke thought instead of silence—Davidson can become something greater than excellent. It can become a model: a college known not for conformity, but for courage tempered by humility; not for comfort, but for conviction guided by prudence.

Let Davidson shine as an example to every other college. Let us engage in the arduous quest for the truth. Let us be known as the bastion of free speech and liberal learning.

Let us cast off timid restrictions and awaken the full passions of our student body, striving, together, toward a brighter and braver future.

Let those words endure as our motto, the excellence we share with the world!

I interned at Roof Above’s Day Services Center in Charlotte, where we served people experiencing homelessness and those living in shelters. We provided meals, laundry, showers, and even acted as a mailing address. Through the Champlain office’s Stapleton Davidson Internship, I was placed at the nonprofit and connected with a host family through Covenant Presbyterian Church.

One day, while I was holding the front desk, a father walked in with his son. The little boy was barely a toddler–old enough to walk by himself, but young enough to be carried anyways.

Still holding his son in his arms, the father asked me for a package. It sort of sounded more like a command. Direct and concise, with no fluff in his words, he clearly was in a hurry.

I searched through the back, rummaging through all the boxes. Double-checked, triple-checked, went through half of them even a fourth time. Nothing came up under his name.

Every intern has experienced this moment. Where something goes completely wrong and you feel humiliated for it. It doesn’t matter whether it was your fault, you had a responsibility to bring results. Maybe I lost the package when it came in, maybe it was another intern or even the director. Regardless, I now had to shoulder the blame. I was the person who had to tell him it was missing.

Beyond shame, I felt a little fearful. Would he shout at me, call me stupid? Would he try to get me fired? I experienced some of that before, but my imagination could always think of worse things. The ambiguity was always more concerning than the consequences.

Quickly, I apologized to him. It was a bit like a dam breaking. Words just streamed out of my mouth. Anything that came to mind was uttered immediately without thought. Several apologies and several more promises to do better—it was a sorry mess of syllables.

Somehow, my mind trailed from trying to defuse the situation to something else. That boy cradled within his arms–he was adorable. So, again my mouth moved faster than my brain.

“Your child is so adorable.”

There was a certain kind of clarity in the way I said it then. Different from the practiced way I greeted him upon entering, and definitely different from the many platitudes I offered him a moment ago. It was just a matter of fact. The boy was very adorable. He was so full of life, still having that pudgy fat in his cheeks and eyes that grow wide at every new sight. He could be mistaken for one of those children in those chocolate commercials.

The entire situation changed. The anger that was clear in him left immediately. The father’s shoulders sagged into ease, as if a weight was taken off him. His eyebrows raised upwards, softening his face. Even a slight chuckle came out of him.

“Ah, you don’t know how much trouble he gives me.”

His eyes told another story. Bright and almost twinkling, they were full of affection.

With a softened voice, he said he’d try waiting a little longer for the package, then left, still carrying his son on the way out and the son looking up at him.

That look stayed with me. It made me realize that love is everywhere. Even infrustration, even in hardship, even in the small corners of exhaustion.

Here at Roof Above, people show up as they are: tired, desperate, hurting. There’s no time for pretense for them; yet there is laughter, and there is love. What struck me most was how raw honesty can be more beautiful than a polished presentation. The people I met here, in their vulnerability, carried a kind of grace I can only hope to mirror. Their kindness isn’t always neat, but it’s real. Their love isn’t always eloquent, but it’s sincere. And their honesty humbles me.

Often, throughout the internship, I met with other interns, fellow Davidson students. We would read parts of the Bible and books on homelessness, and discuss how it applies to people we meet. Our faith gave language to what I was seeing every day. It’s everywhere. Suffering is everywhere, but so is love.

As Roof Above’s CEO Liz Clasen-Kelly ’00 said,

“Working in Roof Above isn't a service to solve any problem and change some people's lives. It is a meeting of people where they are, with patience, respect, and a willingness to see them beyond their circumstances, by simply being present with them in the same space.”

This internship wasn’t just a summer job; it was a formative season of growth. It taught me to listen to everyone more deeply, to approach people without assumptions, and to see God’s image reflected in faces I might once have overlooked.