Dear reader,
This semester has gotten me all tangled up in time. The phantom of graduation lurks ever closer, and bright-eyed first-years remind me just how much time has passed since I first stepped foot on a college campus. I want to freeze these slippery days like an image to film — to create some barricade between me and the unrelenting watershed of change.
When I first arrived on this campus, five semesters ago as a sophomore, Tufts was teetering on a precipice of change. University President Sunil Kumar’s administration was freshly minted, life was finally coming to a new normal after the COVID-19 pandemic and the school was about to plunge into semesters of encampments and protests. My next three years blurred into a haze of administrative emails, midterms, helicopters flying overhead, finals, construction sites melting into refurbished buildings and a packed protest in Powderhouse Park.
Now, as the newest crop of students builds lifelong friendships, attends its first parties and dines at a freshly blue (!) Dewick, I’ve begun to wonder what this current era of Tufts feels like for them. What kind of launchpad will they have for their college journeys? What’s it like to attend college after a chilling effect has set in on student speech; after diversity, equity and inclusion has died rather than still in the midst of an unceremonious collapse; and now that we’re more concerned with “No Kings” than COVID-19?
Most of all: What is Tufts culture now, as they understand it, absent the influence of past experience here? If we could distill Tufts University in fall 2025 into blots of ink on a handful of pages, what would it say?
I’ve set out to answer that grandiose question for this third edition of TD Magazine. Helping me do so is a brigade of wonderfully talented writers. Estelle Anderson grapples with the impact of artificial intelligence in our classrooms. Sadie Roraback-Meagher examines the nuances of Jewish life on campus. Olivia Zambrano dives into a cappella culture at Tufts, from group traditions to social dynamics. Shannon Murphy investigates the new Pop-Up Pub: what it is — and why you might not have been there yet. And finally, Max Lerner explores how Tufts students actually engage with politics.
Throughout my time in college — in classes, on jobs and at the Daily — I’ve combed through thousands of pages of publications. It has become a personal obsession: The most ordinary information feels extraordinary when pulled from a microfilmed, century-old newspaper. These small, everyday details about life that necessarily work their way into every paragraph are, to me, often even more fascinating than the banner headlines above them. They are unintentional snapshots we take of our ever-changing culture.
That is my hope for this magazine: that someday, a few decades down the line, some Tufts student working on some project or other stumbles upon these pages and discovers something startling about our everyday lives — just as I have in the writing of so many Tufts students in our editorial history.
Pax et Lux!
Liam Chalfonte
Tufts Daily Magazine Editor, Fall 2025
