Emerson Alumni Launch Boycott

Sarah Edrie is the kind of alum Emerson loves. A whirlwind on the local arts scene, the 1995 WLP graduate served on Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston arts councils, worked with Arts Boston, co-produced a movie debut at Bright Lights, worked on First Night at A.R.T, and had a stage role in the art-music production of Army of Broken Toys for 15 years.

She often collaborated with Emerson panels, produced Black Box shows with students, brought speakers to classes, and was scheduled to talk to an upcoming arts-econ class. She has given money to the college every year since graduating. Not now. “I won’t be doing any Emerson things,” said Edrie in an interview last week.

Edrie has joined more than 200 Emerson alumni who say they are refusing to give money or time because of the college’s treatment of protesters last spring and its policies clamping down on demonstrations and free expression.

“What changed for me started with the protests and how they handled them,” Edrie said. The “punitive action” Emerson took in firing the outspoken head of Bright Lights and the discipline handed out to students cemented her decision, she said.

The call for an alumni boycott is being organized by a group that sprang up after the prominent online alumni group, the Emerson Mafia, banned discussion of the issue last May. Others established the group Emerson Alumni for Justice in Palestine on Facebook and Instagram, launching the call to boycott. Emerson Alumni launch boycott. The organizers say Emerson is now prohibiting the kinds of free speech and demonstrations they practiced openly as students.

“I was absolutely horrified” by the college’s protest policy, said Maria DiPasquale, who graduated in 2016 and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. At Emerson, she participated in protests for cultural competency, in protest of the police killing in Ferguson, Missouri, and in support of dining hall workers. “They were really important moments for my growth as a student, and it sounds like things that would not be allowed at Emerson now.

“Blaming the low enrollment on protesters is just absolutely false,” she said. “I think the kinds of folks who would be attracted to attend Emerson would be turned off by the administration’s action,” not by the protesters, she said.

Lissa Deonarain, a 2018 graduate who lives in Omaha, recalls organizing protests for the group POWER, for a more multicultural curriculum, and other causes. “We took over the dining hall, we were standing on stairs, chanting, leading demonstrations. We marched into the Faculty Assembly in the Bordy. We marched through buildings,” she recalled. “That was a promising time for me, when at least Emerson was allowing us to express ourselves.”

She said the call to boycott talks to classes, to sit on panels, to meet with students on campus is a way of demonstrating the value of the alumni network at Emerson.

“Alums don’t really donate a lot,” she acknowledged. “But what Emerson really loves to do is get alumni involved. We have power, and boycotts have proven to work.”