Journalism minors Christa Dutton and Jimena Elmufdi delivered senior orations at the annual Senior Colloquium earlier this month. Here’s the link to their talks or read the full text below.
WHATEVER IS TRUE
by Christa Dutton, 2024
Seek the truth and report it.
That is the first principle of journalism I learned in the Introduction to Journalism class here at Wake Forest. In many ways, my life, and especially my college years, can be summarized as a pursuit of truth.
As a little girl, I was drawn to stories about uncovering the truth. My favorite movie was Harriet the Spy, a story about a young girl who carries a notebook with her everywhere and writes down what she observes. In elementary school, when my class got to go to the library, I always brought home Nancy Drew. Eventually, the librarian begged me to try a different series. But instead of becoming a detective or spy, I chose to study journalism at Wake Forest.
“Seek the truth” isn’t just a challenge posed to journalists but it is a challenge to all of us when we enter the university. You have come here to study a discipline, and I hope you only care about what is true about that field. Scientists, economists, and mathematicians do not care about fake theories. Even as creative writing students craft their fiction, they are highlighting truths about the world.
“Tell the truth” is a simple demand but not an easy one. In fact, it is only becoming harder. I began my time at Wake Forest in the fall of 2020 when the truth was under immense attack in the United States. Misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic was rampant. Our country was reeling from intense polarization. Americans were trusting the media less and trading in the truth for lies crafted to make them feel more secure and empowered. In November of 2020, President Joe Biden secured the presidency, and former president Donald Trump denied the results, despite there being no evidence of widespread election fraud. Two months later, supporters of Trump and the wider political movement he represents, raided the U.S. Capitol Building. Live on television, I watched as Americans attempted to violently undermine our
democracy. Meanwhile, I was just getting my start as a student journalist at the Old Gold & Black, where my job was to tell the truth.
Two courses I took my first year at Wake Forest convinced me to join the newspaper. The first was a seminar instructed by the terrific librarians Rosalind Tedford and Hu Womack. The class was about mis- and disinformation on the Internet. We learned how to wade through fake news to find the stories that were trusted. Seeing how misinformation was harming communities, especially ones in news deserts, made me want to be a part of the solution to publish more trustworthy journalism.
Secondly, I took a writing seminar with Professor Phoebe Zerwick, director of the journalism program and adviser to the Old Gold & Black. In this course, we read Professor Zerwick’s award-winning series published in the Winston-Salem Journal called “Murder. Race. Justice: The State vs. Darryl Hunt.” The series led to Hunt’s exoneration after he spent 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Professor Zerwick’s work showed me what the truth could accomplish. It could change lives. It could set people free.
Over the past four years, the thing I will remember most about being a student journalist will not be the stories I’ve told. Although there have been some big ones. I will most treasure that I learned how to embrace the slow, sometimes difficult process of uncovering the truth.
Getting to the truth requires listening and watching and waiting. It’s slow. It’s the opposite of the immediate gratification we’re all wired to want. To seek the truth while reporting a story, your mind must always be alert. You must have your ear to the ground, listening to what people are saying and what they’re not saying. That’s sometimes just as important. You have to
ask tough questions. You have to read long documents that no one else bothers to read. You go to public meetings that no one else has time to go to. And you do this again and again and again
until you have a story. And that story has a life. It has consequences. People make decisions and form opinions based on the truth that you tell them.
Searching for the truth has taught me to be patient. And curious. And disciplined enough to piece together data, evidence, and observations. It’s taught me to keep an open mind and to be committed to inquiry, a process which our world needs more of as misinformation continues to pollute our public forums.
Being a student journalist has also taught me to be humble. You must always remain more impressed with what you don’t know than what you do. You also must be humble enough to acknowledge your errors when you make them. Earlier I mentioned how the American public is trusting the media less. Trust, however, must be earned.
I’ve also learned that honesty can be difficult. The truth about this university hasn’t always been flattering. As an institution, we’ve made our mistakes. An independent student press brings those injustices to light and holds the powerful accountable so that this university can be a better place. That’s the key. We tell the truth to document history but also so that change makers can do what they do best, make constructive change.
Life is disguised as a quest for many things. Power. Money. Status. Love. Happiness. My observation is that life’s real quest is for truth. You can say that you are searching for happiness, but ultimately you are searching for an answer. You really want to know if it’s true that the dollar amount you daydream about will actually make you as happy as you think it will. You are searching for what is most true about yourself and the world we live in.
I challenge you all to go on a search for the truth. The truth is valuable in its own right, but the journey to get there will also edify your mind and your character. What are the fundamental truths you believe about yourself and the world? Have you ever searched for them?
I promise that the pursuit will mold you into a person who thinks more critically and cares more deeply.
Earlier I mentioned two courses at Wake Forest that got me into journalism. Well, there’s actually a third course that also inspired my interest. It’s one that might surprise you — Introduction to the Bible. In that class, we read a verse that says: “…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.” This verse became a guiding principle in both my work and my life. Many aspects of our world are not praiseworthy, but I challenge us to think about how they might be redeemed. As I wrote in my last letter from the editor in the Old Gold & Black: “This is what journalism is all about — reporting what’s true in hopes of creating solutions toward a more admirable, excellent world. That world isn’t here yet. In the meantime, we tell the truth.”
SILVER LININGS
by Jimena Elmufdi, 2024
As a visual learner, I’m always looking to capture experiences in some observable way. I like to think that hoarding thoughts is both my blessing and curse. If I drew out my overall experience at Wake Forest, it would probably look like a graph with off-the-charts highs and lows. I’m sure many others would agree with this visualization because, as much as we want to romanticize our college years, they can be shockingly harsh. Especially for those of us terrified of having a blank slate and who had no clue who we were or who we were supposed to be.
Curious to see my four years laid down on paper, I began to draw out my graph, carefully trying to categorize these substantially high and low peaks that so distinctively marked my college journey. I walked through each semester, noticing how different they were. Each fall and spring with nothing in common but repeated weather patterns. At first glance, my graph was just that; big accomplishments and humbling crashes. Reading my name for the first time on a print edition of the Old Gold & Black and completing my first all-nighter for my Astronomy midterm which introduced me to my Red Bull intake limit. Yet my comprehensive experience at Wake was much more than these monumental steps along the way. The things that made my time here memorable were all the small peaks and dips in between that I had obviated during this run-through of my Wake Forest trajectory. I could leave this campus with a list of memories that played the leading characters during my life as a student. Or I could dig a little deeper, embracing the fringe details which carried the same weight as a single big achievement.
I walked into campus for the first time as a shy eighteen-year-old girl from a small town in the Dominican Republic. My perception of Greek life came from corny American movies. Having fast-food restaurants at arm’s reach felt exciting, and wandering the aisles at Target on University Parkway was like heaven on earth. I must admit it still is. It only took one of these small things to make me smile. But, at this starting point, I also had a very primitive vision of what life should look like. I oversimplified, boiled down, and condensed everything into big-picture scenarios. To me, life was one big book with four or five main chapters. Things like graduating from high school, graduating from college, finding a job, starting a family… a typical coming-of-age film, you know, the drill. I was convinced that the only things that mattered were the titles of those chapters. How many milestones did you reach, what substantial challenges did you overcome, and how many people validated these goals? Who did I make proud?
And most importantly, what’s next? It took me four years at Wake to begin to modify this flawed point of view. There is one big issue with this life scheme that I had envisioned. If you get too fixated on one type of outcome, you miss out on the other things along the way that are equally if not more meaningful than that outcome you praise so much. To feel satisfied with the absence of perfection, to stop being enveloped in the thought of impeccable scenarios, meant that I would learn how to deal with the uncontrollable. As cheesy as it sounds, I became hyper-aware of opening my senses to the small, nice things in life. So, Wake became my testing ground. I learned to see angular beauty in Scales, a building that very often gets misunderstood. I found satisfaction in finding the perfect table at ZSR, the ones on the sixth floor right by the windows that look out into Davis Field. I savored the rush of every touchdown, three-pointer, goal, and home run at sporting events because I’m such a fan of being a fan. I learned to observe, appreciate, and pick up on the peculiar traits of art teachers, the ones who have been teaching the same art class for years and find satisfaction in very mundane objects like a perfectly sharpened pencil or a monosyllabic name that sounds artistic. I eagerly waited for the magnolias to bloom on the lower quad because you can’t have Reynolda Campus without its iconic white flowers. And the list goes on, small details that pick you up from a bad day and make you enjoy the winding, steep road that is your early twenties.
A lot of us like to ponder about the past. How we wish it were better, like having freshman year so viciously robbed by COVID, but this also falls into the ‘uncontrollable’ category I mentioned before. By this Christmas break, I was already being bombarded with the overarching question about the culmination of my college career. Often getting the ‘what would you tell your freshmen year self?’ or ‘What did you wish you knew in August of 2020?’ To my surprise, my mind was blank. Not because my experience had been perfect but because seeking perfection is the one thing that I had intentionally worked on letting go. Strangely, I realized that walking into Luter Hall that gloomy January morning as a clueless freshman was absolutely necessary. Letting go of preconceived limitations gave me room to grow, to wiggle uneasily into myself and it is one of the reasons you see this version of myself standing before you today.