Closing out my first year at Emerson, I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve experienced and, even more so, what I haven’t. 

While I’ve experienced many of the typical college things by now, more and more throughout this year, I’ve gotten the feeling that I’ve arrived at this college in the aftermath of something. I learned what that something is within a few weeks of arriving on campus, and it’s the story everyone knows by now: 118 people arrested, a 6% drop in enrollment, staff cuts and layoffs across the board. At a school with a student body of just over 5,000 in 2024, most people who were on campus at the time knew someone who was arrested, or knew someone who knew one of the someones that turned out to be one of the 118. 

On a small campus, it evidently left a mark. And it’s only grown in prominence in my mind over time.

Now, with even what I would have supposed to be vital functions like the Office of Student Success gone, others replaced by AI technologies, and classes seemingly nobody asked for, I can’t help but feel haunted by an Emerson I didn’t experience, haunted by something that happened before I even arrived. Whatever it was, it’s only for others to say what else those of us who are first years and incoming freshmen are missing out on. This school we have inherited is a different place now, and I can only speak to that. 

All I can say is that Emerson itself feels distant from me. Our president, Jay Bernhardt, is reclusive and beyond reach, only willing to give interviews with prior approval of quotes and emails sent from far-off places. I can’t help but wonder what this institution looked like before I arrived — before the reproach of “before this year.” 

Such an event on campus leaves a rupture, a hole, and though those who were here before tell me as much now, the hole is all I’ve ever known, being here just this year. Something goes there, in the otherwise surefooted professors that freeze and stumble when Palestine is mentioned, and in the seeming absence of student involvement in the wider world at all. 

There’s a political cavity in the center of this campus that I noticed instantly. Looking around the Org Fair that first week, I saw enough clubs to fill a whole basement — film clubs, student publications, even fraternities and sororities — but not any large on-campus political organizations that would be routine and commonplace on any other college campus. I’ve met a lot of people here, but for the most part they are not particularly political people. And I wonder if the people I would have met were in that alley, and now are not particularly political people at all. I wonder if they had the drive arrested and beaten out of them for daring to believe in something. Boylston Students for Justice in Palestine is now largely underground, demonstrations tightly controlled by the college, and when they were cracked down on in October again and driven into full retreat, I hardly heard a thing. 

Consequently, it’s no wonder there’s a silent place in an otherwise creative and passionate campus; we’ve seen and heard what using our voices brings. Because an institution seemingly comfortable with the use of violence on its students is willing to do pretty much anything; a university willing to ignore its students is willing to ignore pretty much anything.

Without those voices, I feel lost here — disconnected from anything that came before I arrived. I’ve seen the bodycam footage, and I walk through that alley almost every day wondering why I’m wistful for a place I cannot know. I wonder for those who were split in the heads with police batons if it significantly improved the school or city. Because this is all there is to do at a school where students no longer have a voice. 

I can wonder without an answer and come away bitter. Because I know, if I had been here, I would have been out there with them, and for a school that supposedly values all these things, I might not have thought it a bad idea either to be camped out there in that alley for something bigger than myself, the kind of contribution to the world that this institution will commend and advertise in 60 years if it lasts that long, like every other has done. 

I might not have thought it a bad idea, to decide like I have, as a Jew and as a person like any other — and as I’m sure they did — that my happiness matters less than those facing a genocidal occupation across the globe, and that that violence must end, even if it leads to part of that violence falling on me. 

Though the fight here ended, perhaps before I arrived, the struggle remains abroad with the people of Palestine, and here on campus. Like the young everywhere and of all times, those who arrived this year like I did, we didn’t see yesterday, and must nevertheless pick it up and find tomorrow. In once again finding involvement in our lives, education, and world, I find the words of renewal in those of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet:

Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time

Close to the gardens of broken shadows,

We do what prisoners do,

And what the jobless do:

We cultivate hope.

I hope, out of this renewal in engagement of our voices on campus and in the world, we can one day say to those first years who come after us: It was worse last year.

Grant De Micco is a first year Creative Writing major born in Arizona with a focus on fiction.