Emerson’s Jay Bernhardt and Ken Rogers on Their Bicoastal Bet Amid Industry Contraction

Look out USC, UCLA and NYU, because Emerson is having a Hollywood moment.

The school counts Henry Winkler, Jay Leno, Jennifer Coolidge, Denis Leary and Norman Lear among its alumni, along with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” Oscar winners Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. 

Emerson Los Angeles, the Boston school’s satellite campus located on Sunset and Gower in the heart of Hollywood, recently broke out new signage that overlooks the Hollywood sign, a visible marker of its growing footprint in the town.

The milestone lands alongside two leadership moves. Veteran cable exec Doug Herzog, an Emerson alum from the class of 1981, was named chair of the school’s Board of Trustees. And longtime media scholar and educator Ken Rogers, class of 1991, was named the inaugural dean of Emerson Los Angeles. 

Emerson College President Jay M. Bernhardt and Rogers spoke with Office With a View about the appointments, how the bi-coastal film school is adapting its curriculum to AI and industry contraction, and what industry jobs students are actually chasing now that didn’t exist five years ago. 

How does Doug Herzog becoming chair of your board, and alumni like Pam Abdy, affect the organization?

Bernhardt: Emerson has been an incredibly accomplished media and film school for many decades, and given our size and our history, we absolutely punch above our weight class in terms of our impact in Hollywood. That’s reflected in the alumni who have come out of Emerson, but right now it’s very reflected in two incredible leaders who are Emerson grads. Doug Herzog is our brand new chair of our Board of Trustees, so my boss and the person at the top of the letterhead. Doug is what I sometimes call the king of basic cable. He has had a legendary career greenlighting some of the biggest shows and stars ever on television, in both comedy and music, as the head of MTV and Comedy Central. We’re incredibly lucky to have Doug and the other trustees we have from Hollywood and beyond, who have brilliant experience and ideas. What they share in common is a deep love of Emerson and all that Emerson stands for. I think Pam Abdy (co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment) is an extension of the same conversation. She’s coming off an incredible run, not just making beautiful films that touch us on many levels, but also that sell a lot of tickets. We couldn’t be more proud of Pam. She spoke to our board last year, and we’re in regular contact with her. What she and Doug and all the other alums have in common is they really love Emerson and what it gave to them, what doors it opened for them, and they care about ways to give back.

What are the three to five jobs that students want who are leaving school and going into the industry that they didn’t want three to five years ago?

Bernhardt: In terms of what are some of the newer types of jobs that students want to go into, I think it’s the full range of what’s available. We’re beginning to incorporate AI more into our work. We have core principles around AI, and courses that teach students how to use it, but all of them keep human creativity and human imagination at the center. That said, some students are exploring technology-oriented opportunities as more companies and startups are created around this. We’re unique in that we teach students how to shoot on analog as part of their experience, all the way through using AI in current workflows or even new workflows that leverage the technology and everything in between.

Rogers: I’m the dean of the L.A. campus, and here we focus on career readiness and industry engagement in the later stages of a student’s path. What we’re finding is we’re able to adapt to the new directional trends of the industry because we’re here in the heart of Hollywood. The areas students are looking at right now are things like sports media, sports communication, games, podcasting, live events, even unscripted. We’re looking at ways to build the curriculum and student internship experience around those, and of course the creator economy and verticals is a very strong space right now. What’s interesting is how all of these things are integrating with the traditional legacy forms of media, and affecting both their business models and production processes. We’re trying to capture that and make sure students have an edge over other people entering the workforce.

Bernhardt: Live events, live activities and live television are all definite growth areas. Emerson’s been in that space a long time, and we have a lot of alumni who’ve made incredible careers around live performance and live directing. I think there’s going to be a lot more growth around live in the future, not only for film and television but music and other media. A second area that’s really unique to us is comedy. We’re the only college in the country, and the first, with a comedic arts major, which is now 10 years old. This is actually the 50th anniversary of the Emerson Comedy Workshop that Denis Leary started as a freshman here. We’ve been doing comedy at the highest level for decades, and I think we have more alumni working in comedy than probably any other school.

Ken, what are some of the things you are doing to uniquely prepare students, and how does that compare to USC, UCLA or even NYU?

Rogers: I think what’s unique about the Emerson experience is that you’re going to a four year communication, professional, liberal arts-based film school on the East Coast, but you also have the opportunity to get your West Coast legs and figure out how to launch your career from our L.A. platform. We have the largest satellite campus of any major film school that isn’t based here, so we offer the best of both worlds. Right now the direction is integrating career readiness structurally with the academic curriculum, so everything students do here supports the development of their skill sets for entering the workforce directly. We’re also expanding our offerings to recent grads, one to three years out, because the need to adapt, support and reskill is ongoing. We pioneered the satellite internship experience about 40 years ago. This is the 40 year anniversary of Emerson College Los Angeles. We started as a modest program run out of the Oakwood Apartments, and now we have a world class building with 210 beds and a regular cycle of students through it. There are about 30 schools that have satellite programs now, and we’re looking to expand experiential education beyond the internship into lab-based classes, studio integrated learning and team-based collaborative work.

So on that note, how does a bi-coastal education uniquely suit students to the rigors of the modern industry?

Rogers: Film schools are, in some ways, regional. The East Coast experience, the college-going experience of being in Boston, gives you access to incredible intellectual context, the core experience of a small liberal arts college, while also being at a top five industry school. Being able to balance those two experiences only enriches both, and I don’t think there are many schools that can offer that with the same richness and depth. It’s also our scale. Most major film schools are embedded in large, cumbersome research universities, and because we’re a small college, we can give a certain attentiveness to students. We know our students by name. It’s a very intimate school, and that creates a strong affinity among our alumni.

Bernhardt: Ken can answer that not only as our dean of L.A. but as a student. He was an undergrad here in film, then went on to his storied career, so he speaks from personal experience. I’ve worked at universities around the country, and there’s no better place to be a college student than Boston. There’s a reason there are more than 40 colleges and universities throughout New England, because it has so many incredible resources and opportunities that build on and connect to each other. Combining that with the hands-on L.A. experience as an ELA student gives the full picture, and that advantages us over many of our peers.

You previously mentioned AI. What about AI most concerns students who are entering film, television and the agencies today?

Bernhardt: A lot of the concern that everyone has about AI, not only students but faculty, staff and alumni, is the amount of uncertainty around how much disruption it’s going to create. We know it will create change in a lot of different ways, but no one quite knows yet, including the people investing in the technologies, exactly how that’s going to play out. What we focus on here is AI literacy, making sure everybody is aware of what it is, how to use it, and what the ethical and unethical ways to use it are as students. In parallel, we create conditions for AI fluency, where people can become experts, usually in existing workflows. How do we use AI as a tool, much like other technologies before it, to do new things in more productive and creative ways. The anxiety largely comes from a fear of the unknown. People worry about displacing jobs and opportunities, and we worry about that too, which is why we think it’s so important to have AI literacy so students can be competitive. Many employers now tell us they want and expect students to come out with some understanding of how AI works, which is why we lean toward AI literacy for all and AI fluency for those most interested in the technology.

Finally, how do you calm students and parents when all they ask about is contraction, consolidation and so on, and you’re selling an industry that won’t even look the same in five years?

Bernhardt: Part of it is around, even through every disruption and technology innovation in the industry, from silent films until today, it’s grounded in great storytelling, in great human creativity. Humans have been telling stories around the campfire since the beginning of the species, and storytelling is who we are. Hearing stories is what inspires us and touches us emotionally, no matter the media used. Those aspects have not changed, and we don’t think they’re going to change. When we talk to parents or families, or teach students across the courses we offer, it’s still all grounded in story, character and emotion, the things that have always been the basis of the work we do. We also tell them we’re going to help their students position themselves for the most competitive jobs of the future. Our career design center is built so that from the first semester students are here, they’re already thinking about their careers and how to position themselves. And one thing Emerson has as good as or better than anyone else is our alumni network. Our alumni are fiercely loyal to each other and to the college. They call themselves the Emerson Mafia, because they really take care of their own. They watch each other, and they open the doors behind them so others can come through. That’s something I’ve never seen at any other school.

Rogers: We’ve been here before. There have been other moments of disruption and consolidation in this industry, and every time it’s happened, from the coming of sound to the move from film to digital, there’s been a contraction, and we’ve come out of it through growth, expansion and new creative opportunities. We’re working hard to prepare our students to think about where the opportunity creation is in this moment of disruption. We’re thinking about the fundamentals of storytelling, but platform agnostic storytelling. Whether you’re telling that story on verticals, in long form scripted, for unscripted, whatever the platform, there are foundational fundamentals you have to be able to adapt if you’re doing a short form one-minute episode or a multi-season show for a major streamer. It’s about the adaptation, creating new kinds of portfolios. We mentioned AI literacy, making sure students understand new tools, and also business fluency, because the business models are changing, the different ways you can make a living at this are changing. We’re adapting along with that. Students are best prepared to adapt and capture change, so we don’t want to just hunker down and worry. We know there’s growth in these opportunities, and we’re trying to seek that out and prepare students for a future that may seem uncertain right now.