Calls to abolish police from college campuses have grown considerably louder over the years. In particular, following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, colleges were forced to seriously consider their role in legitimizing the institution of policing. For decades, however, concerned students, faculty, staff, and community members have sounded the alarm that, for marginalized people, campus policing is as detrimental as municipal policing.
Read MoreImagining Abolition and Educational Safety Beyond Policing →
The parallel movements for police-free schools and police-free college campuses encouraged educational researchers to further investigate education’s policing problem, but also the broader realities about public safety at the intersection of education and society. Altogether, new demands emerged for the abolition of school and campus police as well as the socioeconomic conditions that necessitate their presence.
Read MoreNo Study Without Struggle [Review] →
Broadly speaking, No Study Without Struggle rigorously engages the systemic and structural entanglements of oppression and organized resistance within education and its social con- texts. Bringing together historical records, oral histories, and contemporary case examples, Patel beautifully illustrates relationships of power through the analytical lens of settler colonialism.
Read MoreWhy HBCUs Need Abolition (And the Rest of Y'all Too) →
Yesterday morning, Leila Hamoud, a Black woman undergraduate, was arrested in her classroom at Winston Salem State University (WSSU) by university police officers. Dr. Davis and the Campus Abolition Research Team weigh in on the promise of abolition for our nation’s HBCUs.
Read MoreIn Defense of Dignitary Safety →
Frequent incidents of racist hate speech on college and university campuses continue to instigate an ideological battleground between legal purists, anti- racist scholars, and those otherwise situated somewhere therein. We find that arguments from legal purists are predicated upon a false-equivalency between racist and anti-racist speech where the effect, value, and embedded power dynamics of the former are often disregarded.
Read MoreAn Inconvenient Truth: More Police on Campus Won’t Prevent Gun Violence →
Temple University senior Samuel Collington was shot and killed last November during an attempted robbery and carjacking near his North Philadelphia apartment. Collington’s death by gun violence followed the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old Philadelphian near Temple’s campus two weeks earlier.
Read MoreRacialized Policymaking in Higher Education →
Current popular policymaking theories, however, are inadequate to understand this phenomenon, as they under-theorize the role of racialized power in policymaking – e.g., the racialized network of policy elites and their core beliefs. In this chapter, we endeavored to bring together existing theory, research, and contemporary policymaking examples to offer a framework of racialized policymaking that explicitly describes the lack of progress for racial equity in higher education.
Read MoreAn Introduction to Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground
More than two decades after the Civil Rights Movement, Henry Hampton’s award-winning 14-part documentary Eyes on the Prize chronicled a transformative period in American social and political history and those individuals closest to the grassroots organizing that made it all possible. Altogether, the film series embodied the Pan-African principle of Sankofa, bringing from the past that which may have otherwise been forgotten.
Read More