If there is one thing that I learned from working in Washington, D.C., it was the importance of the pursuit of truth, or at least as much of the truth as one can find. I spent the summer interning at one of D.C.’s oldest and most prestigious policy think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. Working on national security strategy and Pentagon budgeting, I found myself asking each day, “Is this true?”
On most days, I was tasked with tracking the ever-developing war in Iran, yet I never knew if statements on various news sites were accurate or verifiable. There is a specific discomfort in not knowing what to trust, especially when the information comes from purportedly reputable news sources. When I tried to cross-reference a strike or damage report, I often uncovered a conflicting story. These discoveries reminded me that facts and “truth” are few and far between, and that you must practice a healthy skepticism toward authoritative claims.
Now, you’re probably wondering, “What does this have to do with Davidson or running a student magazine?”
Well, I’ve realized that my instinct to interrogate a claim did not start at my desk in D.C., but in classrooms and at seminar tables at Davidson. As Lux’s mission statement aptly puts it: “Davidson has been our intellectual nursery, where living, arguing, failing, and trying again have shaped us toward a fuller mind, body, and spirit.” I have spent most of my time at Davidson in political theory courses, where the first lesson (aside from the differences in the signification of the word “truth”) is that no one’s word is good enough on authority alone. You do the verification yourself, through critical analysis. Playing devil’s advocate is my favorite thing in the classroom and my advisor Dr. Shaw’s hallmark: even then, “truth” proves exceptionally hard to pin down.
This is all to say that, for a publication that “holds one faith: that the pursuit of truth is an arduous path,” I take on the role of Editor-in-Chief of The Davidson Lux with strong opinions about what that pursuit demands. Ethan Tran, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, put it more bluntly than I would. He called me a “glutton for punishment,” another of Dr. Shaw’s familiar asides for those of us who sign up for multiple theory courses. Yet the statement isn’t far off, and the office-hour siphoning Ethan wrote about in “Onwards, Lux” is, admittedly, a common occurrence. Those office hours have been invaluable to me in my conviction to pursue truth and may well be the reason I’m the one writing this letter. Had I not taken up so much of Ethan’s office hours, he would not have seen my commitment to truth in action and entrusted me with this publication.
This commitment is one that our mission statement makes for itself, though: to uphold the liberal arts tradition as a pursuit of truth across all disciplines. We students are, as our mission statement outlines, “still young enough to resist rigid prejudice and old enough to think independently.” These words describe me arguing in Dr. Shaw’s office hours, before I ever thought about running this magazine, and they describe anyone who sits down to write for us now.
In Lux, no field is off-limits. Lux does not treat politics as more serious than economics, economics more serious than a lab report, or a lab report more serious than a campus-wide situationship epidemic. The instinct that I’ve spoken about, the refusal to take a claim on authority alone, exists in every Davidson student and belongs in any field where someone is trying to discover the truth. That’s why the magazine has never limited itself to one subject and why this year it won’t either. It is also the reason we are committed to rigorous noncensorship, freedom of speech, and freedom of expression. Without those commitments, truth is unattainable.
Moving forward, our purpose will continue to be “not to rival the institution that raised us, but to extend its mission … Because we love Davidson, we aim to carry forward its liberal arts tradition: to cross artificial boundaries between disciplines, to bind thought to experience, and to keep the public good in view.”
D.C. didn’t teach me to ask “Is this true?” Davidson did.
That’s the whole point of this letter. Lux exists to encourage and hone that same instinct in whoever writes for it next.
So I ask you to read this letter the way I’d ask you to read anything else in these pages: skeptically. Don’t take my word for what Lux is becoming. Read what Davidson students have to say now, or come write for us and find out for yourself.
And please know that this invitation isn’t limited to political science majors or people headed for a policy career. If you study biology, if you spend your nights in the studio creating art, if you’ve never written for a magazine before, we want your ideas, too.
Here’s to truth, transparency, and a commitment to the public good.
Welcome to the first light of Lux 2026–2027.