To the Editors of the LIU Post Pioneer

I am a freshman here at LIU Post, pursuing a B.S. in music. I had been planning on attending this school for a significant amount of time. Since hearing of this university’s music department, I attended an open house, had a private lesson or two with music faculty, spoken with cur-rent students and alumni, and even attended the “Exclusive President’s Dinner.” The vague “Only a select number of students have been chosen for this opportunity, and you are one of them!” mentioned in the invitation seemed like a cheap tactic made in an attempt to evoke feelings of uniqueness and individuality from students. Something about the dinner felt cold and impersonal. The dean I’d met with relayed false claims to me, which began to stir my suspicions and negative feelings toward this university.

Since my junior year of high school, I was dead-set on attending this school for a B.M. in music performance. My lengthy experience and time spent on this campus weaved a strong emotional connection to Post for me. I thought it strange that a private school with an insanely inclusive eighty-three percent acceptance rate (in comparison to their SUNY neighbors) could leave me with such a powerful sentiment of love and eagerness. My burning desire to escape the restrictive clutches of my high school was fueled by the promise which lay ahead at LIU Post.

When I received my acceptance letter on the cloudy afternoon of Wednesday, December 12, I saw the “You will look good in green and gold,” and I immediately burst into a fit of happy tears. I stood there, basking in a feeling of victory, still aware of the fact that this was a uni-versity with a more than non-competitive acceptance rate.

The following day, I got off the bus and went of the LIU Post website. The music department’s option for “B.M. Music Performance” disappeared. The degree I had anticipated pursuing for so long had vanished. Rumors declaring that the performance degree would be terminated were true. Current students had been telling me not to worry; they told me that a “stay” had been put on the performance degree, and that Post wouldn’t be seeing a fall in the music department for at least another ten or fifteen years. The pessimistic and unreputable voices spreading rumors had been correct.

Since my dedication to this school was so strong, I still decided to attend the school. Rather than changing my area of study entirely, I merely chose to pursue a B.S. in music– a much broader and less intense degree. For now, this was okay, for I had been told that the perfor-mance degree was “under construction.”

One random day in May, I opened up Instagram, and one of the Post accounts on my feed had cursed my day with the image of sharks swimming under a rising sun. The caption told me that we were now the LIU sharks, boasting brand new colors of a weak blue and an overpowering gold. No longer would I “look good in green and gold,” and no longer was I a member of “Pioneer Nation.” This was not the school that I signed up to obtain a higher education from.

This was a school that was setting fire to the widely pursued degrees, the arts, the careers of Division II athletes, job positions, beloved traditions, and much more. This was not a school welcoming me with open arms. It was an artificial, accepting, and promising place on the outside; on the inside, it was something of a ruthless lumberjack. It was a lumberjack deforesting the beloved trees and ponds which composed LIU Post in a cheap attempt to build a mall (a Division I school) and ultimately reel in more revenue than ever before. Of course, this approach is counterintuitive. From the outside looking in, it seemed that students were silent on the matter of the abrupt rebranding (although it is not commonly known that this was a conspiracy long in the making). I am now aware of the protesting voices that have been silenced with empty — yet heavy — threats. Why violently eradicate colors, mascots, and other customs which people had loved so much? Not only will it will continue to drain this place of morale, but I am sure that it has also cost a fortune to splash an underwhelming shade of blue on every ex-green sign, door-way, booth, shuttle stop, you name it, on campus. Scholarships I had been promised were not given to me, yet the school has not batted an eyelash when it comes to dumping money into non-sensible “assets.”

I have not been here for very long at all, though the tired rhetoric the administration has been feeding the student body is getting old. Our voices will not continue to be drowned out. We, the student body, the audience which the administration’s purpose is to serve, are here, and we will be heard.