Letter from SGA President Esénia Bañuelos
This statement is exclusively in response to the allegations documented in the December 1 article of the Bi-College News, the importance of the Bryn Mawr College student, and the continued necessity for the Self-Governance Association to be respected. All invocations of administration are interchangeable with ‘senior staff.’ This statement is intended to redirect campus tradition of unspecific criticism of ‘administration’ with specific recipients.
It was the afternoon after the Fall 2025 Plenary.
For the first time since April 2025, President Cadge and I spoke to each other in the same room since a housewarming dinner in recognition of my Board’s election to our respective positions in the Self-Government Association. This meeting was intended to transpire monthly between the Self-Government Association and the President as general tradition and particularly in line with the requirements of the SGA Constitution for SGA to be in communication with administration. However, due to repeated bureaucratic delays and a lack of communication, our meeting seemed more like a yearly performance review of accomplishments and strife. Notably, we were asked to produce a list of concerns expressed by the student body.
[Editors Note: When asked why President Cadge and SGA had not held monthly meetings, Samara Sit, Bryn Mawr’s vice president for communications and marketing, said in an email communication that the first date which worked scheduling wise for students and faculty was Nov. 17. Sit also noted that the meetings, while traditional between SGA and the president, were not required.]
During this meeting, President Cadge remarked that she “doesn’t do demands,” and that she responds only to dialogue. We hosted a Remembrance Week of the 2020 College Strike only the week before, with over eleven teach-ins and educational panels from students, faculty, and staff. She did not attend a single event, and went on to publish her November Update citing Martin Luther King Jr., which I interpreted as a passive acknowledgment of the Week (the article was seemingly about Lantern Night and did not mention the Remembrance Week once).
President Cadge was aware and on-campus for, at minimum, some of Strike Week. On Tuesday, November 11, she had cancelled an AMO dinner on campus explicitly in observance of the Strike Week, encouraging the invitees to attend. At the same time of the planned AMO Dinner, there was a planned AMO panel.
[Editors note: When asked whether or not Cadge was in present at events hosted in honor of strike week, Sit said that Cadge was “was traveling for college business during some of the time of the strike remembrance week events,” and that students can request the president’s presence by contacting her office or through the president’s website.]
Invitation to intentional dialogue from the Self-Government Association had been avoided at nearly every turn, but we engaged her interest head-on. Unsurprisingly, we were met with skepticism.
The most important issue on campus, one that I have been privy to through the panic and choked sobs of my classmates, is surveillance. President Cadge could not disagree more. In response to my expression of the most pressing student concern being surveillance, I was met with disbelief. “What do you mean ‘surveillance’?” I offered a one-word response. “Cameras.”
Pictures of these same cameras had been plastered on fliers by students as we spoke, fliers spread across our dormitory floors, on students’ private bulletins, and even slipped under doors into the privacy of our own rooms, captioned with text that advised Bryn Mawr’s punitive use of OneCard swipes and data collection overall. Crucially, I had presented a resolution to lock all campus buildings and make them accessible by OneCard swipes only a day prior at this point, which would later come to pass with a 73% approval rate by the students, and that resolution came with significant concern about a non-negotiable clause to remove all cameras from Bryn Mawr campus. I held my breath and sincerely hoped that this magnanimous concern on campus would be taken with a serious and thoughtful understanding of our community values.
“How do we suppose we deal with theft? It’s what Haverford and Swarthmore are doing,”
Her words gave me pause.
“This is Bryn Mawr.” I finally replied.
[Editors note: When asked the events of the Nov. 17 meeting and whether or not the quotes attributed to Cadge were accurate, Sit stated in an email communication that “The College does not surveil students and the president was seeking to understand what students mean when they make this claim.” Additionally, regarding the assertion that Cadge brought up theft, Sit stated that during the meeting “the president explained that there have been thefts and other security issues on campus and asked the SGA representatives how they think the College should handle them. She also offered context about how peer institutions handle such issues.”]
President Cadge’s exact line of reasoning appeared in a campus-wide communication by Vice President for Finance and Administration, Samir Datta, four days later. Her name was missing from the list of signatures at the foot of the communication, and only Dean of the Undergraduate College Tomiko Jenkins and Interim Provost David Karen were named. “We are adding, replacing, and upgrading security cameras across campus,” his November 21st e-mail to the Bryn Mawr community reads. “They are a standard and long-established practice at colleges and universities, including our neighboring peers like Haverford and Swarthmore.”
Perhaps I had missed something in my year of collaborating intensely with the Haverford College Students’ Council—is it traditional practice for Haverford College students to look at their campus and notice new cameras on their campus each day? I am familiar with the Swarthmore culture and its students—the surveillance against them by their administration is extreme. Should those Swarthmore students continue to accept that they are being surveilled?
The weekend of Plenary, our yellow safety boxes were replaced with towering blue pillars, all containing cameras that are constantly on, recording students as they pass. As I sat in La Colombe reading Samir’s e-mail, I thought again on the argument of cameras being for theft—why, then, prioritize cameras on Taylor Hall, which is certainly not a hotspot for packages? The cameras are at eye-level on Taylor Hall, and are seemingly only monitoring community members who enter and exit the building. Even students passing by Taylor Hall on Taylor Drive are recorded. Theft is certainly an issue on campus, but is often one internal to our dormitories – was it being implied that soon, we could be monitored even in our residential spaces?
Samir quiets these concerns in his e-mail, stating that these “security cameras do not monitor classrooms, residential halls, or sensitive spaces.” However, many of our Campus Safety call boxes, like the one in front of Rhoads Hall, or in the Merion Hall parking lot, are directly in front of a residential space, capturing those who enter, exit, or merely pass by. The Taylor Hall cameras alone, facing major walkways and the Pembroke dormitories, Merion Hall, and Denbigh Hall at minimum capture hundreds of community members at all times. Often, as they enter into their residential buildings.
The communication, for all its intent on clarifying the reality of surveillance on this campus, only raised further questions from my peers, classmates, and other community members in the following days. Samir stated that captured security “footage is only accessed and reviewed by a small, authorized group of people when necessary to investigate reported incidents that impact campus safety or property.” Who are these people? Where is this information going? More importantly, why was this the first effort since the September edition of The Lantern to notify students directly of their surveillance?
A concern I had raised on behalf of the students had only been reinforced by senior staff. I began to wonder how justified our students were in continuing to trust the institution. I concluded, finally, that our culture of trust must be disposable if it means relegation to an empty industry standard that overrides the historical foundation for our community and turns Bryn Mawr College’s black and yellow into a demure and palatable beige.
Because the Honor Code is sustained on community trust, our culture is thus established on that belief. We take exams unmonitored and in the safety of our dorm rooms — we create community guidelines together in our dormitories at the start of each year. Trust is a cultural expectation for us, and that expectation reaches each member of our community and into our shared governments. If it needed to be said explicitly: surveillance kills the faith that students are expected to invest into this institution. Surveillance is killing Bryn Mawr College as we speak.
It should not be up to the administration whether our culture of trust exists or not, though they certainly seem not to want to participate in it.
Perhaps, one of the most prevailing concerns, for me, about the state of our campus and the current threats towards our culture is that no one can truly explain or justify what Bryn Mawr College is and what being a member of our community entails—we are always in competition with another college or university, but especially with the Tri-College Consortium we share with Haverford and Swarthmore, even when our community deserves exclusive and personal attention to our own unique issues on campus. Bryn Mawr is unlike any other American institution of higher education. We should relish that.
Instead, we, as Bryn Mawr students, are taken as walking liabilities to the College’s branding and funding structure, and actions by the senior staff reveals a desire to control, monitor, and, thus, surveil our student body to ensure adherence to draconian standards that students never truly agreed to. Unlike Haverford and Swarthmore, we have a Self-Government Association that (should) proudly govern itself in coordination with our sibling governments at the College. Our students are more than capable of meeting with administration and writing these policies for community implementation, and they are more than willing to. It is on the senior staff to engage them.
Where administration seemingly does not engage with us, we make all the efforts possible to work towards solutions and express solidarity with our shared governments at the student level. In the same historic Plenary this semester, the student body voted overwhelmingly (over 85% approval) to repeal a set of free speech and protest guidelines that were written without tangible student input and released, without much of an announcement of their implementation, by the administration. We expressed our solidarity with the Faculty Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom almost unanimously, with a 93.8% approval rate. Our students are committed, now more than ever in the Self-Governance Association’s history, to working together to address objective risks to community safety, using the channels our governance has privileged us in raising widespread questions and solutions to our intended partners in leadership. To say Bryn Mawr students are wholly reactionary is a misunderstanding of our community — fatigued by neglect is a more appropriate description.
I would, however, be misleading and misrepresenting any Bryn Mawr student by stating that our processes of Self Governance are without flaw, and that Bryn Mawr students cannot be reactionary or commit harm at all. We do it to ourselves so often. Since November 16, it is not an exaggeration that our current campus climate is one of total chaos and paranoia, driven by the lack of communication between ourselves and our senior staff and our inability to reconcile with decisions made about our continued presence at the College without us. Our students can be reckless and directly harm the most marginalized students they intend to protect amidst a bumbling desire to take on a responsibility only senior staff can — and they often do it without widespread campus consultation or invitation to construction, creating an infinite mirror of distrust. As a result of our inability to function together, each day, a new, smaller controversy unfolds. The surveillance flyers are one example, but today, our students are not usually discussing a new superficial renovation on campus — they break down in tears, they are constantly on edge for the next action to sweep their residential spaces, and are worried that a new spurious repression of students will incite further unrest. We are so hurt. Our students deserve to live in a climate of trust again — and yes, we, ourselves, must be held responsible to commit to preserving it.
Student journalism has long carried a heavy burden in representing the emotional and physical impacts that these violations against students have created. In a recent article for the Bi-College News, “‘Bryn Mawr Has Become a Carceral Space’: Student Agitation over Recent Administrative Policies,” dated November 23, 2025, students voiced fear and discomfort towards raising criticism and suggestions to the Bryn Mawr administration given the campus’s acceleration towards censorship in the wake of mass protests and unrest across campuses amidst the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. “Current admin have made it clear that they do not respect the honor code and are willing to break established procedures just to punish students,” one anonymous respondent stated. The present atmosphere for student expression is bleak and arbitrary—its future, the same.
I was extremely disappointed, amidst the writing of this article, to learn for the first time of the alleged violations against the basic constitutional rights of our students across the last year, particularly in the handling of the private investigation into Bryn Mawr College students following the interim suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the ongoing probation of Bi-College Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). The private investigations into their alleged members and allies began in response to substantial graffiti and vandalism across campus, though these investigations have not been handled with tact, treated seriously, or guided with the presumed base of innocence until proven guilt that should take precedence in any legitimate investigation. The actions alleged in the article name, in great number, instances in which students were not given access to legal representation with proper notice, and were directly identified and targeted for not only their political beliefs, but for general disapproval of the College and its actions.
This flagrant targeting has undoubtedly shaken the feeling of trust that we are asked to invest in all members of our community. The allegations made of unauthorized dorm searches, the lack of information regarding the status of the investigation, and the endangering of our students’ right to progress within and graduate from the College for an assumptive association to a political movement are not only symptomatic of the purposeful misconstruing of the Honor Code — our rights to free speech and privacy are being violated. Students are asked to divulge their political leanings, and questioned as to their grievances against the institution more generally. Alignment with the Pro-Palestinian cause, for example, are allegedly in the same conversation with general criticism of the college. Let me be clear—students have already been targeted, especially for expressing their support for Palestine. It was always a free speech issue. Now, lines have been blurred between any criticism and a menacing threat to the sensitivity of members of the administration. It is no exaggeration to call Bryn Mawr a panopticon—it is no exaggeration to say that this campus is a surveillance state.
To be a Bryn Mawr student today is to know your actions — your thoughts — may inspire your probation, suspension, and perhaps even expulsion from the college. Our students deserve an administration that will not only enshrine the Honor Code and protect Bryn Mawr College student autonomy but also one that respects and listens to our concerns with care and attention — that welcomes discussion and criticism of administrative decisions, and that asks us to confront our discomfort and build towards a common future.
Unfortunately, at this moment, there is no climate on campus that can sustain this for as long as these policies and motions towards punishment exist—there is no climate for understanding when we are being monitored for any disagreement. There is no dialogue in a surveillance state. For as long as students fear being wrangled into a room with no chance for legal representation – for as long as students are asked to sacrifice their peers for another semester and a blank space on their academic record – for as long as students cannot return to their dormitories without fear that a member of administration and other individuals were in there, free speech on campus is dead. Our right to our spaces is dead — there is no more privacy. All of these (theoretically) inalienable rights lay buried under us.
I hope you will join me in stating that our Honor Code merits significant student involvement in its continued improvement in serving our community, given that it creates the basis for our campus climate — and it should not be an exclusive administrative decision as to its existence, because it is students, and students alone, who are held responsible to adhere. For as long as students are deliberately excluded from creating policies that shape our community, and for as long as students are not able to exercise the privileges that being self-governed awaits us, it is evident that senior staff are working only with the concept of a student — one that is amicable, unopinionated, and unquestioning. The brilliance and bravery of our students is antithetical to that silhouette.
Further, I hope you will agree that our student body should not be subject to surveillance procedures. We should not ask prospective students to consider sacrificing their autonomy for a Bryn Mawr College degree. What will be the next constitutional violation against our students?
Our student community is entitled to protection, security, and trust – it is what our Honor Code is built upon, and consequently, what the culture of Bryn Mawr College is built upon, even if it is crumbling under our feet. It is Bryn Mawr.
You deserve any and every opportunity to process the incredibly distressing campus climate.
On Tuesday, December 9th, the Coalition for Anti-Racist Literacy will be holding a processing space and open forum for discussing reactions to the campus climate. This will take place at 4:15 in Dalton 300. There will be a moderator and a chance to process current events in small groups and an open forum. We also hope to have some time for brainstorming future teach-ins, strategizing future actions, and more. To ensure the safety of members of our community, phones will be collected at the door. Students, staff, and faculty welcome.
Co-Signed by Bryn Mawr SGA Vice President Yeseo Lim ‘25-’26
Co-Signed by Bryn Mawr SGA Secretary Evan Pineo ‘25-‘26
Co-Signed by Bryn Mawr SGA Treasurer Jet Taylor’25-’26
Co-Signed by Haverford Students’ Council Co-President Sarah Elizabeth Weill-Jones ‘25-’26
Co-Signed by Haverford Students’ Council Co-President Ben Fligelman 25′-26′
Co-Signed by Haverford Students’ Council Co-Treasurer and CSCAR Co-Chair Ben Perez-Flesler ‘25-’26
Co-Signed by Haverford Students’ Council Co-Treasurer Sophia Goss ‘25-’26
Co-Signed by Haverford Students’ Council Co-Vice Presidents Oliver Wilson and Grant Devries ‘25-26
Co-Signed by Haverford Students’ Council Co-Secretaries Victoria Haber and Caroline Yao ‘25-26
