POLICING THE UNIVERSITY: A CRITICAL HISTORY OF CAMPUS LAW ENFORCEMENT

Abstract

This thesis treats campus policing as a central mechanism of governance within contemporary public universities. Rather than a peripheral safety service, campus police operate as a system through which universities manage political conflict, regulate physical space, and protect institutional time, property, and legitimacy. Focusing on the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) and pairing it with a comparative analysis of the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment at UW–Madison, with selective reference to other 2024 sites including the University of Toronto, the thesis argues that campus policing functions as a hinge between the university’s ideological mission and its repressive capacities. Through this hinge, dissent and disorder are translated into administrable risk and, when necessary, into enforceable removal. Chapter 1 reconstructs a genealogy of campus policing at UWM from the late 1960s through the 1990s using archival sources such as regents’ and senate minutes, administrative memoranda, interagency correspondence, departmental reports, and contemporaneous campus and local media. It identifies a recurring sequence in which periods of unrest, including antiwar protests, recruitment demonstrations, and racialized conflict, justify expanded police authority, coordination, and surveillance. Once established, these capacities persist as routine safety infrastructure even after the immediate crisis subsides. Chapter 2 examines the organizational present through the concept of “service as control.” Drawing on Althusser’s distinction between ideological and repressive state apparatuses, Bowles and Gintis’s correspondence principle, racial formation theory, Mills’s epistemology of ignorance, and racial capitalism, the chapter shows how everyday enforcement and communication practices shape campus life. Low-level regulation, jurisdictional spillover through memoranda of understanding and off-campus authority, and “timely warning” communications that narrate risk work together to produce a subtle enclosure of space and time, while preserving a standing capacity for escalation. In this account, campus policing appears less as a response to exceptional violence than as a routine system for governing bodies, movement, and institutional order. Chapter 3 turns to the 2024 encampments as moments when this system is compelled into visibility. It interprets encampments as infrastructure and counter-jurisdiction: portable “popular universities” that organize space and time through kitchens, medics, marshals, guidelines, teach-ins, prayer, and mutual aid. Drawing on administrative statements, policy processes, police communications, agreements, media coverage, and post-event rule changes, the chapter traces a recurring strategy. Political conflict is reframed through safety and neutrality discourse. Legal and administrative mechanisms convert membership and presence into revocable status and trespass. Police and disciplinary processes then restore enclosure, and post-crisis stabilization embeds the exception through conduct pipelines, normalized surveillance, spatial redesign, and institutional neutrality doctrines that centralize speech while leaving coercive capacities intact. The paired Wisconsin cases show that outcomes depend not only on legality or principle but also on coercive capacity and interagency coordination. What appears as restraint may instead reflect a temporary inability to enforce.Across the thesis, reform is shown to operate largely within an already mis-specified territorial order. Abolition is instead approached as a spatial project. It requires not only reducing police presence or budgets but also reorganizing and expanding non-police infrastructure, such as housing, health care, survivor-centered processes, mutual aid, disability access, and community accountability. These infrastructures are necessary if universities are to govern safety and care without relying on coercive control.