In 2019, my final year of undergrad, I was honored with the Spirit of Emerson Award in recognition of advocacy, leadership, and commitment to social justice. Emerson then-President Lee Pelton described me as “a radiant example” of student leadership through my work with Protesting Oppression With Educational Reform, or POWER. There, I engaged in activism, protest, and difficult dialogues that frequently drew criticism from peers, faculty, and administrators alike. Despite their contentious nature, these actions were understood as essential to the institutional growth that Emerson purported to value.
Six years later, I’ve returned as a graduate student, but the culture of the institution I’ve come back to feels profoundly unfamiliar. Most recently, I am met with deep disappointment reading the April 22 communication from President Jay Bernhardt, which I find to diminish the validity, urgency, and integrity of the actions students have taken, and continue to take, to address their concerns with Emerson. The email exemplified precisely the institutional behavior that drove both POWER’s demonstrations, and the 2024 encampments—acknowledgment without accountability, superficial empathy without systemic action.
Bernhardt’s email opened with: “The weeks leading up to finals and commencement traditionally involve both stress and anticipation, and this year is no exception.” It reads innocuous at first—a typical administrative preamble. However, I take great issue with framing campus protests in this context. Students do not protest lightly, nor do they put their personal safety and academic futures at risk without genuine cause. By diminishing these protests to emotional episodes rather than deliberate, informed acts of resistance, the Emerson administration continues to undermine the gravity of the real, substantive issues students consistently voice.
The letter acknowledges “increased media coverage about last year’s encampment,” describing the resulting atmosphere as potentially “challenging.” However, Bernhardt frames this distress as an emotional reaction rather than a legitimate response to tangible harm. He urges those feeling “distressed” to seek help from campus wellness services. This implicitly signals that those affected by these complex systemic issues bear the burden of coping and individual emotional management, rather than compelling the institution to transform the conditions causing distress in the first place.
Bernhardt reaffirms Emerson’s support for freedom of expression, then immediately qualifies it with a warning about “reasonable limits” to prevent “harassment and intimidation.” These terms, which he references as behavior that will not be tolerated, have historically been weaponized at Emerson to silence student dissent. During my time as an undergrad, this tactic was used repeatedly to delegitimize student demands—particularly those led by students of color and other marginalized identities.
Take, for example, the 2017 #ThisIsEmerson protests, which emerged in response to repeated incidents of bias and the college’s failure to address them. POWER and other student activists presented clear demands calling for cultural competency training and increased institutional accountability. In response, the chair of the faculty assembly at the time sent a memo likening our advocacy to “McCarthyism,” accusing students of “witch hunting,” and labeling the protest a form of “humiliation” toward faculty. He went so far as to describe the faculty as victims of “discrimination—by hundreds of menacing students.” Instead of reckoning with what students were risking and revealing, institutional leaders deflected, reframed, and pathologized the activism itself.
President Bernhardt’s message follows in that same tradition. He sets vague and conditional limits that reinforce institutional power and protect it from critique. He draws lines around “acceptable” activism and subtly threatens consequences for those who cross them. In doing so, he sends a clear message: Your protest is valid only so long as it does not challenge our comfort, our image, or our control.
By emphasizing the encampment’s violations of city ordinances and characterizing it as a “heartbreaking situation the College sought to prevent,” the institution reframes protest as a matter of procedural disruption rather than moral urgency. This fixation on administrative compliance erases the critical question: Why did students feel compelled to occupy a public space? Students engaged in protest precisely because established channels had failed them. Bernhardt’s message trivializes the substance of student demands to regulatory inconveniences, but his reframing of institutional responsibility as a matter of legality rather than community care is not new. It’s part of a longstanding pattern in higher education at large, where rule-following is prioritized over justice, and harm is minimized so long as the institution remains in procedural bounds.
But let’s be clear about the scale of what happened. At the 2024 encampment, 118 students were arrested. With an estimated total enrollment of over 4,000, this means nearly 3% of the student body was affected. When I began my career at Emerson, the college had just over 3,200 students, and Black students made up about 2% of that population. Imagine with me for a moment if every Black student on campus had been arrested. Would this community still dismiss those arrests as regrettable but justifiable outcomes of “policy violations”? Would we still be so quick to move on?
The students arrested were not just breaking rules, they were challenging systems. Emerson, like many institutions, has shown time and again that it struggles to meet that challenge with anything more than polished language and delayed action.
This critique is not about whether the encampment itself was “right” or “wrong.” I know firsthand that many forms of protest—mine included—are controversial and unpopular, and there are certainly things from my first three years at Emerson that I now view differently with the benefit of hindsight. Rather, my concern is the institution’s repeated unwillingness to sincerely engage across differences in experience and perspective, to hold space for uncomfortable conversations, and to genuinely recognize the very real harm and trauma experienced by many students in our community.
The work I did as an undergraduate activist was personally and emotionally costly. It involved trauma, burnout, and interpersonal strains. I believed, back then, that the sacrifices were worth it, and that pushing for institutional change could create something better for those who came after me. But as I watch current students face the same institutional gaslighting and erasure, I’m not so sure. The Emerson I knew thrived because students and administrators, even when in deep disagreement, saw each other’s humanity and potential for growth. That genuine spirit of collaborative disruption and innovation seems largely absent to me today; I have re-entered an institution that feels profoundly diminished in a way I haven’t yet found adequate words to articulate.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through my career in educational equity and justice work, it’s that empathy is an expensive investment, and we have to have a budget for it. It demands more than a line in an email—it demands a reckoning with how we operate, who we prioritize, and what kind of discomfort we are willing to sit with. Amid the college’s repeated mentions of “budget challenges created by the decline in enrollment,” there is a critical failure to ask and meaningfully address why students, faculty, and alumni are becoming increasingly disengaged from the Emerson community. Budget shortfalls cannot be explained away by external market forces alone; they are symptoms of internal fractures in trust, transparency, and accountability. When institutions dismiss systemic harms as mere disruptions, community engagement is bound to wane.
True leadership requires confronting injustice squarely. It means moving beyond hollow platitudes about diversity, inclusion, and dialogue. It is the courage to face criticism, the humility to admit wrongdoing, and the resolve to enact genuine transformation. It demands institutions like Emerson, built upon the principles of creativity and social justice, to do better than polished language and public relations. It cannot be reduced to carefully worded press releases or calls for abstract “unity.” It demands a reckoning with the difficult truth that advocacy which challenges the status quo will never be tidy, quiet, or convenient.
President Bernhardt’s email signals to our community—many members of which continue to bravely challenge institutional inequities—that their most passionate, righteous, and critical work is tolerated only within sanitized, acceptable parameters. But when I was recognized for embodying the Spirit of Emerson, it wasn’t for being agreeable. It was because I was relentless in my demand for a better institution.
The Spirit of Emerson is not decorum. It is disruption. It is the pursuit of justice over comfort, truth over reputation, and transformation over tradition. It is time the institution remembered that. Until Emerson recommits to that spirit—not in words, but in action—it will continue to drift further from the community it claims to serve.
Alexis Newman ‘19 is an organizer and facilitator specializing in leadership development and capacity building for students and higher ed professionals. She currently leads national campus programs at the Student Basic Needs Coalition and is a Transformational Leaders Graduate Fellow in Emerson’s MA Digital Communication Leadership program, continuing to advocate for educational equity, institutional accountability, and student voice.