Campus Abolition and Police-Free Futures (2025)

In the wake of national discourses about the future of policing, many colleges and universities are questioning their institutional relationship to municipal and campus police. As student activists have raised critical questions about campus police department budgets, hiring practices, and whether police are needed as first-responders on campuses at all, concerns about student safety, campus crime, and conjecture surrounding the universities’ inability to resolve crises if campus police structures are altered have guided institutional responses to growing criticism.

To address these and other related questions, Campus Abolition and Police-Free Futures (Johns Hopkins University Press) illuminates the longstanding relationship between higher education and the carceral state. Drawing on theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, the book argues that today’s colleges and universities are expanders of the carceral net through their over-reliance on police, extractive relationship to the public, and furtherance of the social and political conditions that necessitate policing and expand criminalization. The book concludes with a discussion of the conceptual underpinnings of abolitionist praxis and the growing social movement to reimagine higher and postsecondary education as a life-affirming institution.

Whiteness, Power, and Resisting Change in US Higher Education: A Peculiar Institution

Edited by Kenneth Roth and Zachary Ritter
Foreword by Charles H.F. Davis III

This edited volume connects the origins of US higher education during the Colonial Era with current systemic characteristics that maintain white supremacist structures and devalue students and faculty of color, as well as areas of study that interrogate Whiteness. The authors examine power structures within the academy that scaffold Whiteness and promote inequality at all levels by maintaining a two-tier faculty system and a dearth of Faculty and Administrators of Color. Finally, contributors offer systemic and collective solutions toward a more equitable redistribution of power, primarily among faculty and administration, through which other inequities may be identified and more easily addressed.

Activism and Social Movements in College: Actors, Contexts, Tactics, and Strategies of Postsecondary Political Engagement

Co-Authored with Demetri L. Morgan and Katherine S. Cho

Across the long history of higher education, activism has played an integral part in the many reconstitutions of US postsecondary institutions, especially regarding greater access, equity, and inclusion for minoritized and marginalized communities. Most notable is the “golden era” of student activism, the 1960s, which continues to predominate the US social movements literature.. College and university activism during the late twentieth century, however, remained relatively understudied by comparison, especially within the formalized field of higher education. In this chapter we focus on three interrelated areas comprising the resurgent study of activism and social movements: movement actors, conceived both individually and organizationally, who participate in various forms of direct action; intra- and extra-institutional contexts in which activism and social movements occur; and the tactical repertoires (including strategies) undertaken by movement actors to transform postsecondary institutions and society. Altogether we conceptualize these areas as the actors, contexts, tactics, and strategies (ACTS) framework.

Toward a Framework of Racialized Policymaking in Higher Education

Co-Authored with Awilda Rodriguez and K.C. Deane

From threatening protestors to cutting diversity office funding on college campuses, one contemporary brand of policymaking has overtly sought to undermine social justice efforts in higher education. Current popular policymaking theories, however, are inadequate to understand this phenomenon, as they undertheorize 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. We first frame policymaking in higher education as an unremitting contest between the maintenance or change of the racial status quo. We enumerate specific policy strategies – through either inaction or sanctions – that status quo policymakers use to stymie racial justice projects in higher education, and close with potential future directions for higher education policy research.

Peer-Pedagogies, Communities of Memory, and Occupying the Floria Capitol

Edited by Amalia Dache, Stephen J. Quaye, Chris Linder, and Keon McGuire

In this chapter, I describe peer educational approaches to teaching and learning (i.e., peer pedagogies) employed by the Dream Defenders during events that transpired during their thirty-one-day occupation of the Florida Capitol. Drawing upon resource mobilization/resource dependency perspectives, I conceptually frame the importance of members and tactical repertoires from an earlier student organizing collective with the origin story of the Dream Defenders. Specifically, I discuss the processes by which the latter organization used reflexive storytelling and participated in civic demonstrations (Davis III, 2015) to: 1) build solidarity, and 2) disrupt existing power relations between the state and youth of color.

Engaging Student Activists

Co-authored with Sy Stokes and Demetri L. Morgan

In this chapter, we contemplate higher education stakeholders’ understanding of con- temporary student activism and students as agents of social and institutional change. One notable difference from other student populations discussed in this book is the extent to which student activists are not necessarily defined by a shared social identity. Rather, in addition to who student activists are, which spans the entire spectrum of overlapping and intersecting identities, we posit student activists are primarily defined by their specific (and sometimes disruptive) political actions (e.g., campus canvassing, building or office occupation, and other forms of protest and demonstration), differentiating them from non-activist students. Such a distinction is an important one, in part, because engaging student activists contains layers of complication in which accounting for high levels of heterogeneity and interactional diversity are necessary. We revisit this action-oriented framing further in later sections of this chapter.