A Look Back: How Emerson Became a Silent and Fearful Campus

The Emerson College administration has deployed an arsenal of tactics to surveil and prosecute students, staff and faculty. College officials have trained powerful cameras from rooftops, have pored over countless surveillance videos, traced the entry taps of students into buildings, posted administrators to try to identify protesters, and pressured students to betray others, according to interviews with those caught in the crackdown.

They have fired student Resident Assistants for allegedly participating in non-violent protests, and more firings are in the works. They have disciplined other students, threatening their college jobs, graduation activities, and moved against staff and faculty.

Now it is revealed that an assistant professor, well known to the administration for his incendiary claims and disruptive accusations, has boasted to a private Facebook group of having taken photos of demonstrating students and faculty, photos that he said were sent to authorities to be used for punishment. He has acted as a self-appointed spy, unrestrained by and with the administration’s apparent knowledge.

This extraordinary campaign by the Emerson administration has transformed a once-intellectually vibrant campus into one in which students and faculty fear speaking out. Almost none of the more than 150 students or faculty who have been disciplined or arrested has talked publicly, afraid of further consequences, even after their discipline was decided.

The administration has used probation and drawn-out investigations to hold punishment over the heads of those with views the administration does not want to hear.  The administration has warned them that talking about their cases could make things worse. It is a decree of silence.

Discipline News has learned of a number of such cases, but those affected are fearful of speaking out. As a result, many on the campus are unaware of the lengths of the administration’s crackdown and its costs on the lives of the punished. Like a secretive regime, the administration has not divulged the extent of its punishment campaign, issuing bland PR statements to portray all as normal.

How did this happen? Emerson has been fundamentally transformed under the short tenure of President Jay Bernhardt.  He arrived in June 2023 to a college that valued independent thinking, where opinions were freely expressed, and demonstrations were creative and commonplace.  He came to a campus where one of his predecessors, President Lee Pelton, applauded student protests as “brave and moving” and even chastened some of his disapproving faculty, saying “Where you see menacing students, I see courageous students.”

Upon the first election of Donald Trump in 2016, Pelton urged students to action: “I want you to understand that to be fully educated you cannot be mere spectators,” he told them.

The new president wanted none of that.  Bernhardt, reportedly the third pick of a Board of Trustees increasingly desperate to fill the job, came to Emerson as a dean at the University of Texas.  There, according to a person in Austin close to Bernhardt, “He surrounded himself with yes-men. If you didn’t agree with him, you were out.”

He also was a Texas Hillel Gold Donor, and at Emerson he moved to stamp those politics on the school.  After the gruesome attack of Oct. 7, 2023 when Hamas broke out of imprisoned Gaza and killed nearly 1,200  Israelis, Bernhardt issued a statement expressing “shock and heartbreak.” But when Israel began a bombing siege of Gaza, an area of 2 million citizens penned in by walls and tanks, eventually killing more than an estimated 50,000 persons and reducing their homes to rubble, Bernhardt embraced an “institutional neutrality.”

When students took a moral stance in defense of civilians, 13 were arrested at Bernhard’s inauguration and 118 persons arrested in Boylston Place alley after four days of non-violent encampment.

Bernhardt quickly established a pattern for blaming others.  He did not know about the arrests at his inauguration, he claimed. Boston Mayor Wu was to blame for the alley arrests, he said.  The Board of Trustees—not him—imposed a stifling protest policy.  The protesters were to blame for the drop in enrollment, not his inept handling of the situation, he insisted.

There were some attempts to push back. The Faculty Assembly voted to censure him in May 2024, demanded more say in policies, and voted in February this year to demand an amnesty for college disciplinary cases.  He ignored them all.

Instead, he brandished the new, dictated protest policy and mobilized his police and staff to doggedly identify and pursue anyone who protested on college property.   In that, he is supported by a small group of faculty and others at Emerson College who have weaponized claims of antisemitism, claiming any protest about Israel’s bombing of civilians—criticism of a foreign government’s actions--  makes Jews here the victims.

One of that group, Assistant Professor Jon Papernick, apparently photographed  protesters, told authorities who he thinks the masked protesters were, and then boasted to a Facebook group of about 60 “Emerson Parents Against Antisemitism” that “Police have my pictures” according to an investigative  story in the Berkeley Beacon. Members of the Facebook group claimed to be in frequent communication with Bernhardt, the story said.

Sixteen Jewish Emerson faculty members were moved last week to publish an open letter urging the administration to reject the “false and dangerous premise that criticizing Israel is antisemitic” and added “It is offensive and insulting when elected officials and university leaders suggest that criticism of Israel is anti-Jewish.”

Bernhardt has yet to join their principled stand.