It’s been almost a year since our campus watched 118 people get violently arrested in the Boylston Place alleyway. The next day, I worked to ensure the Student Government Association, my colleagues and I, listened to hours of testimony before unanimously adopting a resolution calling for the resignation of President Jay Bernhardt.

Before the college asks, “Have we been successful in rebuilding trust, community, and safety on campus?” we should look at the work our institution has done to repair the Emerson ecosystem. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of work left to do. 

On March 22 of last year, the Student Government Association responded to the arrests of 12 Emerson students and one non-Emerson student while protesting outside of President Bernhardt’s inauguration by adding a new committee to review the college’s conduct policy. This had the potential to be a big win. I brought that committee forward to tackle a key issue on campus: our decentralized, opaque approach to student voice doesn’t leave our students or administrators well-served. When college policy is discussed in opinion pieces, anonymous letters, and dining hall gossip, it’s hard for students to recognize what’s true, what’s exaggerated, and what isn’t. Uncertainty about what forms of speech and protest are restricted or punished has had a chilling effect on activism, with many choosing to remain anonymous or not speak up about the issues they care about. All while administrators can deny claims without credible review.

Here’s the problem: While that committee promised a clear, transparent, and unbiased picture of the college’s conduct and free speech policies, along with leveraging SGA’s credibility to coordinate meaningful policy changes with administrators, its seats were never filled. SGA absolutely has the potential to bring Emerson together, but it hasn’t yet succeeded.

It’s not just the student government that needs to redouble its commitment to building the new direction of our campus. Administrative efforts like EmersonTogether have felt scattered and made only a minimal dent in the atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust. That initiative was founded with good intent, but lacks the key planks of an effective response. Thrown together without enough student input and a mission that keeps changing, EmersonTogether offered neither a comprehensive path forward nor credibility. 

Emerson’s administration has decided to take almost no accountability for the arrests and their fallout. Without accountability, I can’t see students viewing these efforts to rebuild our community as anything but empty.

SGA has been focused on expanding the Lion’s Den hours, making attendance policies more inclusive, and other small wins. The administration lacks credibility. That leaves a vacuum, one that activists could have tried to fill. Instead, students who were scared to gamble their disciplinary standing left, and Emerson pushed to further restrict student protest. But it isn’t the responsibility of activist groups to chart the future of an institution like Emerson, and those students were scared and marginalized. While many remain committed to openly advocating for their causes, there is no comprehensive activist plan for restoring trust, safety, and free expression on our campus.

So here we are, eleven months since the encampment raid, with no real plan. Administrators have failed to regain credibility, so it falls to students and faculty to create that credible plan. Those of us who are interested in a healthy campus environment—where expression is encouraged, individuals are respected, and no one gets arrested—should find a way to get involved.

Organizations like The Berkeley Beacon and SGA have the infrastructure to rise to this challenge. We should be having conversations in the open rather than private chats. We should be creating a student-informed roadmap for campus culture. We should be taking a critical eye to how every part of our college community has impacted and been impacted by the brutality of last spring and the festering distrust we now live with.When you break a bone, it’s important to get it reset as soon as possible, so that it doesn’t re-fuse in the wrong position. Like a broken bone, Emerson’s cultural climate is settling into a new normal, but it isn’t a healthy one. As the college begins putting its new five-year strategic plan into action, it’s time for students to build a comprehensive cultural plan of our own. SGA should rise to that challenge.