Emerson’s decision to eliminate two programs will not be reversed, college officials said in a statement to The Beacon, after announcing they cut both programs and laid off 10 staff members last week.
The decision follows President Jay Bernhardt’s announcement in June that the college would lay off staff positions to address budget cuts caused by an enrollment decline.
In the past week, many members of the Emerson community called to appeal the college’s original decision and reinstate the Engagement Lab and Bright Lights Film Series, however, their elimination is permanent, confirmed Michelle Gaseau, the interim vice president of marketing and communications for the college.
The college cited “budget challenges created by the decline in enrollment and the need for the College to focus resources on mission-critical academic programs,” as the reasons for the decision.
The Engagement Lab was an applied research and design lab founded in 2010 by director Eric Gordon, a civic media professor at Emerson. It offered graduate-level courses for over a decade and later, an undergraduate minor in Social Impact Design.
The Bright Lights Cinema Series was a film screening program presented by the Department of Visual and Media Arts, with a mission to foster dialogue and support a community of media “makers, academics, and aficionados.” Started in 2012, the program was run by Anna Feder, the Head of Film Exhibitions & Festival Programs at Emerson.
Moving forward, the college is “working closely with faculty who are affiliated with the Engagement Lab to explore ways to continue the curricular components of the work separate from the Engagement Lab,” Gaseau said.
Separately from last week’s layoffs, the Engagement Lab let go of its staff, including four full-time positions, after Emerson decided to end its financial support for the lab in late June, Gordon said in an interview with The Beacon.
“Our staff have been supported through a combination of Emerson money and grants. The result of Emerson ending the institutional commitment is us no longer being able to support the staff,” Gordon said.
Though they are Emerson employees, the Engagement Lab staff’s salaries are made up of external grants in addition to funding from the college, Gordon said. This means they are not part of the Emerson staff union and are ineligible for the same separation agreements offered to the 10 staff members laid off by the college last week. They were not included in the voluntary early retirement program offered to other staff, nor did they receive severance packages.
Some staff will end their positions as early as mid-October with others ending towards the end of the fall semester, when Gordon will terminate his position as director of the lab.
Though the lab no longer receives funding, classes for the estimated 60 students who registered for the Engagement Lab for the fall semester will still be held, Gordon said. Although the affected classes will continue this semester, he said they “will not have the depth of interaction and collaboration that has been the case since previous semesters,” because of budgetary constraints.
“This semester, because we’re sun-setting all of the infrastructure around the engagement lab classes, the [community] partnerships are not going to be as significant as they’ve been in the past,” Gordon said.
There will no longer be community partners in the classes working alongside students and instead, “it’s going to be much more of a traditional, service learning style class,” he said.
The lab traditionally offers between four and six classes a semester under its Social Impact Design minor, which is made up of a multi-disciplinary course that brings Emerson students and community partners together in joint efforts of project development. After launching two “Social Impact Initiatives,” in 2021 and 2023, Gordon said it felt like the lab was starting to really start to hit its stride and spread its message.
“It felt like we had this really wonderful momentum of turning that decade of work into curricul[a] and just the energy of having students in our classes and committed to the minor,” Gordon said.
Then, he was notified early in the summer that the lab would be discontinued.
“It was a surprise,” Gordon said. “[We had] a really spectacular kind of upward momentum, and then it just sort of met with the realities of the institution at the moment.”
While the pathway for students who will not complete their Engagement Lab requirements this semester remains unclear, Gordon said he is committed “to mak[ing] sure that all the students in the Social Impact Design minor [still] have a pathway to completion.”
Leo Bocock is a junior VMA major with a Social Impact Minor through the lab. As part of his minor, he worked with other students and community members in the lab’s Transforming Narratives of Gun Violence (TTNGV) initiative to create a documentary in partnership with a Boston non-profit that works with previously incarcerated individuals to tell community stories.
“I found that I was a lot more dedicated in [The Engagement Lab] than any other class I’d taken at Emerson. It was unlike anything else,” Bocock said.
Bocock, who is one class away from completing the Social Impact Design minor and is still working on the post-production of the documentary project, found himself “blindsided by the news,” of the lab closing.
“We’re really close to finishing this piece … and I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” Bocock said. “It felt like the school was crushing my dream. I’ve sort of been mourning the loss like it’s a death.”
Bocock, like many others who were involved in the Engagement Lab and Bright Lights programs at Emerson, had hoped something could be done to reverse the college’s decision-making, but after reaching out to Gordon for confirmation, Boccok learned the college’s decision was irreversible.
“My immediate thought was that I wanted to leave the school, [but] I didn’t [because] I figured in staying and organizing with other students, [I] can continue the same kind of work,” he said.
Among those fighting to save these initiatives is Jessika Landon, a senior VMA major and the editor-in-chief of Latent Images, “Emerson College’s only film journal.”
In addition to posting a solidarity message on Latent Images’ Instagram calling for the restoration of the program, Landon said she hopes to start programs like a filmmaking newsletter and gathering resources to help students get discounted or free access to local film festivals and screenings to “try and fill that void,” that she says Bright Lights will leave.
Despite this, Landon said she thinks Bright Lights can never quite be replaced, and especially not by an administration-created program.
“There are so many experiences that so many students have had there that I don’t think they, as in the administration, can replicate without Bright Lights,” Landon said. “Like the talks with the filmmakers and the marginalized communities that have been represented in Bright Lights … I don’t think they can do any programming that will have the same impact.”
Landon said one of the main reasons the series was so unique was because of its programmer, Anna Feder.
“I think that it will be hard for them to find someone like Anna who will run a program with such passion and the ability to build community in that way,” Landon said.
In addition to feeling upset or betrayed by the program cuts, many students expressed confusion and frustration with the college’s reasoning for eliminating the initiatives.
“They said that they were cutting it to benefit more programs that directly tied into the curriculum,” Landon said. “But I would argue that Bright Lights did because we went there for class and [covered it for class].”
There were other underutilized programs that could’ve been removed instead of the film series, said Hailee Munset, a sophomore interdisciplinary studies major.
Landon said she believes “cutting [Bright Lights] goes against what the college is trying to present itself as a place of diversity, inclusion and community.”
“I know the college said that they wanted to focus on the art of filmmaking, but I don’t think it’s fair to discount [the conversations that programs like Bright Lights introduce] because that is something that we have to do as VMAs,” Landon continued.
Many present and past students reflected that they saw these programs as “mission-critical academic programs” in their own right.
“[Working for the Engagement Lab] was the first time I think I’d ever been able to reach outside of the Emerson community within Boston, and actually feel like I’m having an impact on the greater community with the work that I was doing in storytelling,” said Beau Williams ‘24 and former student employee at the Engagement Lab.
Emily Abi-Kheirs ‘15 is the program director at Salem Film Fest, the largest international documentary film festival in Massachusetts.
She said the cancelation of Bright Lights is a “huge loss,” to the Boston film scene in addition to “a big loss to students academically as well in exploring their professional pathways and avenues after college.”
“I don’t say anything to discredit the work that so many amazing film organizations are doing, but Bright Lights really was different,” Abi-Kheirs said. “It [was] more than just bringing films … [Bright Lights brought a] wide range of films that intersect different issues of power and privilege and ability … [and] so even just that gathering space is going to be a huge loss.”
With many different emotions continuing to be felt across the Emerson community, a renewed call for transparency in administrative decision-making continues to be raised in light of the program cuts and layoffs as it was for earlier issues like tuition hikes and campus arrests.
“Overall, there just needs to be more transparency if you want your students to like you and to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing,” Munset said.
Beacon Staff Sam Shipman contributed to this report
