Welcome to the new Culture section. 

Today, the Arts & Culture section is being renamed to Culture, a change meant to reflect the broad focus of our section’s content. 

We are making this change for a number of reasons. First, to us at The Lafayette, arts are culture. There is no way to separate the two concepts and, thus, we have found no sense in separating them by name. We are committed to continued, comprehensive coverage of the arts, just now under the umbrella of Culture. 

Aside from the logistical nightmare that fitting “Assistant Arts & Culture Editor” into one column poses to our design team, we are searching for the name that best fits the nature of the content we want to center on moving forward. Culture is a handy catch-all for the type of content that we as an editorial board have decided to lean into — the stories. We don’t want to be a section of summative articles running through the calendar of the prior week. We want to dig into what makes Lafayette what it is: the people. 

On any given day, our campus is brimming with life, from research being conducted in laboratories to a frisbee inevitably being tossed on the Quad. These are the stories we want to tell, and Culture allows us to do that uninhibited. 

Culture as it is defined now is a tremendously broad term. Through one train of thought or another, it could be argued that it encompasses almost everything. But so does the Lafayette community. Our goal as a newspaper and, more specifically, as a section, is to represent what Lafayette really is. Yes, the arts are an integral part of this equation and will continue to be moving forward, but to us, this means covering everything from small businesses running out of dorm rooms to student thoughts on the latest blockbuster. This is our campus life section — our campus is our culture, and our culture is all of you.

Sincerely,

Your Culture Editors

Maddie Marriott & Bernadette Russo