Transcript - "Conceptualizing Campus Abolition and the Movement to Resist University Expansion and Urban Renewal"

Transcript - "Conceptualizing Campus Abolition and the Movement to Resist University Expansion and Urban Renewal"

April 25, 2023 -- CRG Forum Series hosted by Critical University Studies, a CRG Research Working Group

Listen to "Conceptualizing Campus Abolition and the Movement to Resist University Expansion and Urban Renewal" with Charles H.F. Davis III.

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LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon and welcome to today's Center for Race and Gender Forum, “Conceptualizing Campus Abolition and the Movement to Resist University Expansion and Urban Renewal” with Professor Charles H.F. Davis III of the University of Michigan.

I want to begin with the land acknowledgement.

We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin (Hoo-Choon), the ancestral and unseated land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo) speaking Ohlone people the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley Community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the University's relationship to native peoples by offering this land acknowledgment we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.

My name is Leti Volpp and I'm the director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We are really thrilled that you all are here for today's event, which was organized by the Center for Race and Genders Research Working Group, “Critical University Studies. And which is co-sponsored by the  Chancellor’s Independent Advisory Board on Police Accountability and Community Safety (IAB), Berkeley School of Education, Center for Race & Gender, Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies, ESPM Graduate Diversity Council, and the Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley.

The Center for Race and Gender sponsors proposals for research, working groups to support faculty and graduate students to sustain interdisciplinary collaboration and critical research on topics related to race. Gender and their intersections. We're very excited to support the work of the Critical University Studies Working Group, which was convened to foster a scholarly community to engage in transdisciplinary critical theoretical inquiry related to the study of higher education. Coordinated by Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel and Caleb E. Dawson, of the Environmental Science Policy and Management and Graduate School of Education. Respectively, the working group has brought Dr. Charles Davis here to Berkeley to help us better understand the relationship between the university and the carceral state. I'm so glad you can join us for what will be an amazing discussion, and I'm going to now turn this podium over to Caleb and Rosalie. Thank you.

CALEB DAWSON:  Okay, Dr. Volpp.

LETI VOLPP: Thank you. Thank you.

CALEB DAWSON:  Yeah, when I extend a gratitude of really again to the Center for Race and Gender. When the for, when the Critical University Studies working, you got started back in spring 2019, we needed support to bring speakers because we. As much as going to organize amongst people on campus, we knew we also needed to reach out to a broader community of scholars who were doing work that was really meaningful and important to us, so that we could, through work. So that we could really be building our working relationship to larger movements within the field of higher Ed (education) , but even beyond higher Ed and the social movements that happen in these sites. So really grateful to the Center for Race and Gender for sponsoring things, from books to bringing out speakers, and even us having a a writing retreat in the fall. The Center for Race and Gender has been a big support from as early as 2019 to now, so thank you all for for the support. Yeah.

Also want to give a big thank you to Alice, one of our founding members, back in 2019, when got started. Who's out here and also helping us to host this event. And then, of course, Rosalie, who this year is the primary person convening it. You can tell who's really leading something or organizing it based on the e-mail at the bottom, whoever it says, “contact this person.” That was definitely Rosalie, Rosalie has been a long-time staff member at Berkeley and has transitioned to being a full-time student. Those lines blurred for a while, and grad students, always workers. But Rosalie, you've done a phenomenal job bringing us together throughout this year, and for this event too, so thank you for all of your fantastic hospitality, organizational skills, and just your commitment to movement building and community building. We're really, really greatful.

Going to introduce Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III.  Dr. Davis is one of those people who, among our group numerous times throughout the couple couple years. We were people were going to a conference and they say, oh, we should invite Charles Davis to come and we're really excited that we get to have you here today. I'm going to read. Dr. Davis's bio, but. And yeah, I think y'all might understand from reading the description of the talk or the title, that this is really a substantive engagement with abolition at the side of the university. And thinking about university even beyond, or abolition beyond the university. And really grateful for you for the work that you do and for the possibilities that you model for us.

Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III is a third -generation educator and artist dedicated to the life, love, and liberation of everyday black people. Dr. Davis is currently an Assistant Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher, Higher and Post Secondary Education and Director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab at the University of Michigan. Dr. Davis's research is broadly concerned with issues of race, racism and resistance and education, and its social context to include a focus on the racialized consequences of higher education on society. His current work examines the way his campus and campus, campus and community organizers work collaboratively to reimagine public safety and security through the divestment of colleges and universities from the institution of policing. Please give it up for Dr. Davis.

[Audience applause.]

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Alrighty, how's everybody doing?

AUDIENCE: Good

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Good, good. It's very good to be here. I think what I'm most excited. About is to be in a room with other people who are thinking seriously about. This both in the context of your own work, but also in sort of the context of college university life. Which of course includes, a lot of folks beyond are the undergraduate experience, which as we know, is higher education researchers much of what we understand about college universities is only through that premise, right or only through that lens.

So I'm excited to think with you sort of in this developing sort of idea of what I'm calling “Campus Abolition”, an extent to which there's a larger genealogical tradition, right, that this is but a marker on that long genealogy.

And so I'm hoping that we can talk a bit about sort of where you come into the conversation, as well as where sort of I am with the conversation at present. And then how together we might think more collaboratively, iteratively about how this might apply and take up in a variety of areas of higher secondary living.

 So I first want to shout out the folks in our lab. So yeah, come. On in. So I currently direct and founded a a space more than anything called Campus Abolition Research Lab, and part of this which we can get into the specifics later, is how and in what ways we might make aspects of our work legible to the institution in order to steal away and redistribute the resources it has to offer. Any lab often serves as one of those types of places, much like a center or an institute. And so the sort of idea in thinking about this was how would we be able to leverage the brand and the resources of the institution to be able to convene people to think collaboratively in this exercise with us. And so one of those ways is to stand up this lab, which had a pleasure working with some amazing researchers and scholars, including a number of folks who serve as research associates, but more commonly like graduate research assistants. I think that they're classified by the university but do so much more than that and really. Driving a lot of our work forward, so I just want to shout these folks. Brandy Jones, Cassandra Arroyo, Jerrell Skinner- Roy, Laura Lee Smith, Taylor Lewis, and Yvonne Garcia, all of whom are at are doctoral students at various stages of their journey within the higher education program. And so what is a bit different, perhaps as a place that doesn't have higher education pro forma is the Center for the Study of Higher and Post-Secondary, is the longest standing higher education program in the country, and so if not there to take up some of this work, where else can and should that happen? And I'm just really thankful for the generosity of these students who thought it not robbery to go to different program, find different advisors, to take up different work, that we have a chance to think about this in a deliberative and intentional way.

And they're also joined externally by Brenda Wadley, who is a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, which is my alma mater. And by virtue of being black in a doctoral program, we are connected, you know, across time and space in that regard, but also some amazing work around issues of policing in Arizona, specifically around black women's experiences with policing. DeMarcus Jenkins, who's working, may be somewhat familiar with and primarily in K12 space. Professor Penn State, I think is moving to the University of Pennsylvania relatively soon as a visiting fellow with us. And Doctor Sai Stokes, who some may be familiar from his undergrad, reputation, if I can say for being a good troublemaker at UCLA, and I've had the pleasure working with him for the last six or seven years now.  Is in a capacity outside of the academy, for a variety of different reasons. But he's generously stolen back some of that time. Going brother stole back some of. That time, he continued. To work with us.

And so before I get sort of the specifics of the talk. A couple of things that have to be the shameless plug. So we have a podcast coming out as a part of our abolition in May work. And I'm really excited to be in conversation with amazing folks that includes scholars, practitioners, organizers who are working for police free futures. To really take up some of the myths that are commonly associated with how we think about and understand campus policing, and really troubling this notion of what police actually do, in the context of their work as an extension and furthering the apparatus of the carceral state.

Going to be like, I think just amazing set of conversations that I'm simply facilitating, starting with the registering of campus sexual violence, the idea of safety beyond the Institute of Policing for Minoritized students on college university campuses, understanding the similarities and differences between municipal and campus police, and also how we might imagine police for futures sort of in this, you know, radical possibility that again, we're all sort of working towards an effort of world making.

Secondly, we're going to have a pop-up writing opportunity come out through our partnership with the National Center for Institutional Diversity. Who I'm deeply indebted to for supporting a lot of this work in its early stages. And they will be facilitating through their Spark Series, which is their primary public engagement platform. A solicitation of folks to write essays in relationship to campus abolition, broadly conceived in the K12 and higher education sector. But again sort of confronting the notions around discipline around punishment, control, and how they're taking that up in their work. And we will likely extend, although this is a limited sort of opportunity to extend this series to further opportunities to write together. And so we hope that that will be a thing that you all can receive even be engaged with. And you can find all of this information on our website campusapplication.org, or follow us on Twitter at @campusabolition.

So with that, I now.

Want to talk about sort of this entry point into this work and what we're thinking about carcerality. I start in thinking about the relationship between issues of carcerality and higher education.  And the majority of higher education research at present, with some of you may be familiar with really has two relational positions as relates to carcerality. One, the first consider is the relationship between formal partial institution being jails and prisons, and how access to higher education is gained and facilitated for incarcerated people. But secondly, research also examines the ways in which higher education and degree completion and virtually correlate with rates of recidivism for formally incarcerated. And so these are both obviously important demands that should be taking up and thinking about this particular relation.

But one of the things that troubles me about this right is that when we understand relationship between education and incarceration. A critical sort of gap exists in the dimension of investigating. This thing that is largely absent, which is to say in some parts that while substance. This just happened in the K12 sector. Less has certainly happened in higher education, but not thinking about how schools, how universities play an intimate role in the facilitation of criminalization and create the conditions that necessitate policing in the first place. Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Can you speak? A little bit slower. I cannot take notes. [laughing]

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Yes, absolutely.

And so in thinking about that right, and the ways that we have not fully sought out the exploration of how like post-secondary institutions are actually consequential for society. This is the thing we need to consider and so of course, but also Carla Shedd’s work in the K12 sector conceptualize this. Idea of the. Carceral continuum.

And the way that I'm sort of taking that up and in my work is thinking about this broadly, to refer to the interconnected pathways within and between systems and structures of judicial punishment, detainment, detention and other related forms of institutional discipline and state surveillance. And with a particular focus on higher education I argue that colleges and universities over reliance upon campus police and policing, which I would distinguish a little bit, as arbiters of public safety and security as a means by which they expand the cultural continuum, the mechanisms of racialization that disproportionately affect relations, racially minoritized people on and in proximity to campus.

Right. And so thinking about Carla's work is troubling what we've understood about the school to prison pipeline. Is one that sort of like linear thing, that one leads into the other opposed to the ways in which they both function similarly, right, and have the capacity to criminalize and punish.

And we'll talk about that in the context of the carceral state in a second.

But I want you to imagine with me, right, given what we understand about the state of our K12 schools particularly in urban settings and the generations now of children who have only grown up in educational environments with the presence of police. Right. And part of what we sell to them is that if you do well here, right, you can be and exist in a world that is actually a police free future without actually understanding how we've socialized them already to be in relationship with policing as an apparatus. And moving from now K12 environments that have police have police into campus environments that also have police.

So what are the implications then for a continuum that doesn't account for say, justice involved youth. who, as we talked about I think earlier in our conversation. Right. Having already had a relationship with the carceral state. Now further is that relationship based on them already being determined as outsider coming to a college, university campus, like Berkeley, like Michigan, like Penn, like any of these other places where we presume not to belong.  Right.

And so I think in that way it really troubles this notion of what YAPA (Youth American Policy Advocates) calls this perspective of thinking of universities as a domain of solutions, and society as the domain of problems. Right. When we think about it that way, we don't actually raise the sort of question of how the problems right or that sort of call to crisis that often happens in higher education, which Leigh Patel talks about in her work, our crisis of the university's own making. Right. And so I want. To be thinking about that as we're moving.

So in thinking about now this in the context of what we're calling “The Carceral University”. Royel Johnson and Jude Dizon, one of my collaborators, offering their recent article, this idea of the college prison nexus. Which sort of takes out what's been talked about in K12 and thought out more as the education carcerality nexus, or the school-to-prison nexus, which Erica Meiners talks about in her work. But the carceral state in that estimation can be broadly understood as a network of multiple intersecting institutions, including but not limited, to physical jails and, and also state agencies, like child welfare services, immigration, customs enforcement, and not-for-profit organizations that have now acquired the capacity to police and punish, mostly racially and ethically minoritized people, and those from economically disenfranchised backgrounds.

That. This includes, of course, causing universities who now have campus police departments. And I'll go through a sort of typology of how those have evolved over time. That now employee campus police that have the dispensation to arrest and punish. Right. We'll talk about also what that means in the. proximity in relation to campus.

So when we consider the specifics of campus carceral, we're drawn to consider the ways higher education is both an apparatus of and an extension of the carceral state. This includes the ways that facilitates the logic of surveillance, control, domination, and punishment, as well as its support of the prison prison industrial complex, vis-à-vis its investment portfolios and stock holdings.

Right. So we know that often and we're talking about this as well, the extent to which universities, as neoliberal enterprises, are also engaging in the active investments, right, in prisons and profits that are coming from prisons. That in some ways would create a sort of sense of detachment, as if they don't know. Although been brought to light by student organizers, many like yourself, who kind of keep reinforcing this point of like “we don't want our money being tied up in this particular way.” Some faculty who have also articulated desires for their retirements to be divested. And we see this probably most prominently in issues around fossil fuels. Now where we see a lot of that from different organizations.

And so in other instances, there's also this historical entanglement with prisons as a source of experimentation on incarcerated people. I'm going to talk about. That in a section.

So in thinking about this sort of typology has been maybe basically three main ways of understanding campus policing.

And so Sloan writes about this as early as 1992, talking about the Watchmen, pseudo police and modern campus police iterations.  And so first, when we think about the beginnings of campus policing. A lot of this was around what they called the sort of maintenance and physical plant ties. That they were simply there to protect college property, detect fire hazards, drug boilers and preventive maintenance. Right. Like basically service folks who were doing grounds monitoring essentially at the particular point. The pseudo police were instituted in the 1950s and 60s that reported largely to the Dean of students. And this was somebody doing similar work but also, was now in a position of being investigative. So they would protect evidence, detained suspects, report crimes to local police. Right. Not actually being the policing apparatus that's in charge, formal criminalization. Supporting the end local parentis. Right this in lieu of parent sort of part of post-secondary education and then to relegate regulate student conduct right. All done by this particular iteration.

Now at the same time as we know, because history teaches us and your Berkeley, some need to explain to you all what's happening in the 50s and 60s, right? The rise of the modern campus Police Department happens in large part based on a concerted effort by multiple campus presidents to try to address, through also a Pesidential Commission. What do we do about these rowdy students on our campus? Right. How do we think about the police as an ability to interrupt, right and disrupt the levels of political dissent that are happening?

So they then start to accrue formal policing powers by establishing paramilitary structures in the campus police departments. They carry authority symbols that we're all familiar with, right, whether that's badges or whether that's side arms. Things that sort of signify their role of of authority. They enforce law and order on campuses and other services to the campus community.

So this is the area that we sort of suddenly find ourselves. And of course. We know as the relation between the military industrial complex and modern policing in the carceral state has continued. Right, it's only amplified since then with regard to the various things that police are expected to do on our campuses.

And so in thinking about that beyond sort of these particular policing criminalization, we could also think about this with regard to the enforcement of borders, right, the determination of insiders, outsiders are presumed outsiders. And what that means for what's actually being enforced and protected.

 And so as I'm thinking about aspects of this, I want to sort of trouble this notion that which I think most of us already get. Right. That police protect and serve specific things in particular. People right and that typically doesn't look like me. Right. It also typically doesn't look like neighborhoods that many of us come from. Right. That job here is simply to reinforce the social the spatial and symbolic boundaries that in some ways are fictitious, but also are able to be marked based on how we're seeing universities expand. And I'll talk a bit about how. That's manifested in Philadelphia.

So we look at policing by the numbers and these data are from the Campus Law Enforcement Survey, which is administered about every seven years. So there's an iteration that's already been administered for, I think, the 19 to 21 period that someone, whoever the contractor was, is working on it current. So these data, I think are primarily 11/12 data that were reported out in 15. So you can imagine there's some adjustments that could be made, but usually it's in the direction of moving greater than it is to be less right?

So first, 95% of four-year institutions with 2500 or more students have a campus Police Department. 75% of which are unable to carry side arms, which can include guns and tasers. And we could talk about also right this language around which ones are lethal and which ones aren't, even though we know both of them kill people and have certainly.

80% of those police departments are able to patrol off campus. Right, so this is often a common myth associated at campus police only do work inside the formalized campus boundaries. However, what again they're doing is border patrolling essentially, right? So there are these campus borderlands, if we might think about it in that regard, that separates community from the institution, in part because the institution doesn't see itself as a part of community, but a community unto itself. So it already creates this dynamic between us and them, that campus police are reinforcing. And 86% of them are permitted to make arrests.

So if you were to look at your campus policing data, what would you find? Chances are you. Going to find that the majority of the patrols arrests and stops and interactions are happening off campus, right? You're also going to see that most of those are with everyday people who are living in proximity to campus, not necessarily students. In large part because of things that police are mostly entrusted to deal with on campus are gonna be property issues, or alcohol and drugs. Right.

And you can look at the Campus Safety Survey data that shows the reporting on these and what police are spending their time doing. Which thankfully and shout out to the Graduate Employee Organizations at the University of Michigan did an amazing project abolitiongeo.org that looks at specifically the data related to the University of Michigan police. That the university was unwilling to give up. And they found some creative and interesting ways to make sure that we can get that data and get it public.

But they heat mapped essentially like how these things are working and what the things folks are working on. And part of this will push against this sort of justification for why police are necessary. That actually isn't panning itself out based on what the data tells us of what police are doing, how they're spending our time.

So in thinking about all of this, I also want us to think about again the distinction between police and policing. So one of the things that myself, Brenda Wadley, whom we’ve we mentioned, and Holly Joshua Hamilton are thinking there is this sort of idea of both the campus safety enterprise and campus surveillance personnel. Which is largest, say of course, we want to talk about police departments.

But let's talk about all the other ways in which folks are engaging in policing. Right. So the way we sort of conceptualize is sort of interlocking set of both individuals and systems, institutions that absolutely include residence hall administers. Is anybody in here been in RA before? Right. So as an RA, right, like you are trained and socialized into relying on the police to do sort of the basic everyday things that are happening in your dorm, should any disturbance happen. Not necessarily thinking through the implications of which students may be involved. Right. Who will be criminalized and thought about to be responsible for a situation or incident, right. Or who will be reported to codes of conduct in a particular type of way. They may have irreversible consequences on their educational possibility. So we have, you know, residence hall administrators, we can ask about student affairs administrators more broadly in this context. Visible police, right?

So this overlap between municipal and local police. So in the same sense, right? You could be stopped on campus by, say, Berkeley Police, as much as you could be stopped off campus by Cal Police. Right, same situation. So you're now navigating this jurisdictional liminal space, if you will, right where, like, there's a bunch of folks who have jurisdiction where no one has jurisdiction at the same time. So then what does that mean when you're navigating sort of these carceral apparatuses, in which multiple police departments are things, which about what you need to be concerned.

There's also campus security, right? So those sort of formally in security-based role that are not themselves police, usually will not have a firearm, but in some cases that is what's happening in some place. But also thinking about like who is usually the staffing for campus security, it's usually folks who are from local communities, asked to police their neighbors, right? So how are we thinking about that also? Is a certain type of carceral intent. And then again, we're calling campus surveillance personnel. So that's all of us who have been entrusted in some ways deputized to also engage with policing, right? These are faculty members in classrooms who have, you know, what they would pursue to be disorderly conduct on behalf of students, and we've seen a number of instances in which that has happened recently. But even just everyday people who are encouraged that if you see something, say something, right? But say something to whom and with what effect.

And so that gets us to this point of this idea of what Geo Maher, who's majoring sort of anti-colonial geographer, talks about of “The Pig Majority”, right, or the police majority that is. The majoritarian of of those of us doing the policing, aren't formally sworn in as police officers, right? That the apparatus of policing actually relies upon us as citizens to do the primary policing function that allows us to engage them as an investigative arm, not one is preventing the actual things that are happening.

What about budgets so? Again, pulling from the same data, we know 2.7 million was a national average from 2011 to 2012 by comparison. Looking at University of California specifically, which has one of the largest budgets in terms of a systems level, not just with 78,000,000 across the campuses in 2009, 2010 but has escalated. Right, nearly double within a 10-year period.

[hum in agreement]

Right. So with that 50% ballooning. Right. Needs to be juxtaposed this persistent underfunding of different UC campuses, right? All UC campuses are not funded equally, but also widespread food insecurity amongst UC students, which is about 50%. The underfunding of campus mental health services, wage theft in the form of gross and paid teaching assistants, and adjunct faculty. Right, which is evidence obviously by the strike that's happened and continues to happen every other year like clockwork.

At UC Santa Cruz, administrators spent $300,000 a day and 5 million in total to deploy campus police and police from other UC campuses. The Santa Cruz PD, the California National Guard, and the California Office of Emergency Services, to enforce an order during the Wildcat Strike of its teaching assistance in in 2020.

So the question is not whether we have money to do the things. We know that actually might keep people safe. Right. It's like, where are we spending it and why we think of safety only as a thing that happens after the fact, not a precondition. Right. And so one thing about this, some budget aspect of this as a carceral entanglement.

Another one is university sponsored research. And so I alluded to this before, the extent to which incarcerated people and prisons have been used as sort of a lab site. And so as an example, between the 1950s and 60s, it was very common practice for university researchers to conduct experiments that expose incarcerated people to viruses, funguses, asbestos and chemical agents.

Albert Kligman, a dermatologist at Penn, was permitted by the city of Philadelphia to conduct experiments at the Holmesburg prisons. You can look all of this up. There's a campaign around this now, which was predominantly filled with incarcerated black men and included testing of the chemical agent dioxin, a component of Agent Orange. Right. We're familiar enough at this point, the consequences of Agent Orange on the body. Kligman’s research also had an afterlife when two of his former students, Howard Maibach and William Epstein, faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, conducted similar dermatological experiments that exposed 2600 incarcerated men being assessed and treated for psychiatric diagnosis at the California Medical facility in Vacaville, to harmful herbicides and pesticides. Now, while both institutions have recently apologized and expressed some sense remorse for their involvement in the aforementioned experiments, including Maiback who is still affiliated with UCSF, no formal commitment or distribution of reparations to those incarcerated or their families has been recorded. And although a lawsuit was filed against Penn and Kligman, by incarcerated patients of Holmesburg in 2000, the lawsuit was summarily dismissed as it exceeded the statute of limitations. S

o we're seeing this particular containment right all the ways in which communities generally, which incarcerated folks specifically have been exploited at the expense of not just research, right, but also capital and forms of capital, right? Dermatological experience specifically go to industries, also generate money, right? Or ways that people's research agendas are subsidized in the same sort. Of thing. So some other version and specific version of racial capitalism is functioning there.

And then last but not least, this sort of idea of university expansion and overall.

So in thinking about the aforementioned data that I mentioned and the disproportionate rates which black people generally whether they're affiliated with the university or they live in proximity to campus, exist in this heightened state of precarity when it comes to their individual and collective safety and the presence of police. It is beyond time, in my estimation, for higher education to recognize its role in expanding and legitimizing the carceral.

If we further consider the relationships between generations of student activist demands, campus police patrolling patterns, and the involvement and shooting deaths off campus. Right, we can think about Samuel DuBose, the University of Cincinnati in 2018. We can think about Jason Washington, who was killed by Portland State University police around the same period. We consider these off-campus deaths, the inconsistency and the corrosion of previously conceived boundaries of how the universe lines becomes visible.

And so as I mentioned, while that includes boundaries that are social and symbolic, and others that are physical and spatial. It reveals this deep structural relationship between post, secondary institutions and policing as a racial colonial project of surveillance, criminalization, control, and carceral punishment. That is directly implicates universities, especially in urban metropolitan areas, and their endless efforts to expand their boundaries through the acquisition of already stolen land. Right.

So again, through the lens of racial colonialism that all of these institutions are on stolen land, some of which was stolen and repeatedly perpetuated by the Federal permits, sorts of subsidies. We could talk about the moral act and how all that planned out. We have some experts already in the room that could also give a guest lecture on that as well. But then that stolen land being made into property. The genesis of which includes the dispossession from indigenous peoples and the exploitation of enslaved and incarcerated black folks.

Right. And so we see this a lot and especially in the colonial colleges and its relation to slavery. But also in the South, right, that there are institutions whose land was bequeathed and people's wills as they were dying, were plantation owners. Right. Clemson University is one artifact of this.

And so in the mid 20th century, we see a different version of this as universities were expanding using urban renewal and redevelopment projects that were also subsidized by the federal government and facilitated by large American cities that displaced hundreds of thousands of black low income families and cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and others into Bal, Baldwin's work explains this in great detail.

And so I want to talk about what this is look like in Philadelphia. And so I spent the last three or so years engaging with organizers and others who are in and around City of Philadelphia, myself, a former Philadelphia resident. I have family there. Went to graduate school there. Thinking about sort of what's been happening contemporarily with the campaign that you'll see about in a bit. I want to talk about the area historically known as the “Black Bottom”.  In many places have some an area talking, sort of in the same sort of way, right. Where black people have been historically, but through marginalization or generations of migration. In Philadelphia, in an area formerly known as Greenville, which was home to Philadelphia's black residents, many of whose families have since been in Philadelphia since enslaver William Penn imported in slave Africans in 1865. The Black Bottom was a residential area for black families in West Philly that migrated north in the early 20th century. However, following the displacement of residents due to urban renewal programs in the late 50s, the Black Bottom was all but destroyed in some subsequently renamed University City. As urbanist historians Puckett and Lloyd have described the level of powers as well and Baldwin as I mentioned, the development of University City was strategic undertaking between the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and the West Philadelphia Corporation. And you might ask Charles, what's the West Philadelphia Corporation?

[mumbles from audience]

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Come on, we'll call our response.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Charles, what’s the The West Philadelphia corporation?

Charles H.F. Davis III: I'm so glad that you asked. [laughing]

So the West Philadelphia Corporation was a multilateral coalition of higher education and medical institutions that include, principally the University of Pennsylvania, which is a majority shareholder and senior partner, Drexel University, which was then the Drexel Institute of Technology, Presbyterian Hospital, which is now Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. All of which served as junior partners. Together, the boundaries of university were actually constructed, as well as the development of the University City Sciences Center, to redevelop residential and commercial property.

These projects were supported by mechanisms in the 1949 Housing Act that allowed for the designating the Black Bottom as a proverbial slump. Right. This designating of cities as sort of blighted in terms of community that allow for redevelopment projects to take place. That were largely entrusted to these post-secondary institutions, these corporations that were developed, to allow for commercial expansion. And through a process eminent domain, the city's redevelopment authority reappropriated the land for redevelopment, which it entrusted to West Philadelphia Corporation.

Altogether, the raise of the Black Bottom also displaced an estimated 600 low income and black families, roughly 10,000 or so individuals, and demolish local schools and businesses throughout the 1960s. This period of renewal, which was deeply damaging to Penn’s community reputation, has long been referred to as black removal by residents and organizers. A powerful diagnostic frame that is being able to determine what the problem is and who should be responsible. Aim to draw the attention of the racialized destruction, dislocation and displacement caused by urban redevelopment projects and spearheaded by post-secondary institutions of process that is still affecting low income and black residents in West Philadelphia today.

So what I have here? Is a map. From the archive, that sort of delineates one approximation and location to different parts of the institution. So on the sort of bottom half you have buildings that are noted but are mostly about from Penn, and then on the sort of other side of this, because Penn and Drexel are basically built in like parallel parallel corridor, all of which is still on West Philly. And so Sector 3 is the zone that was essentially blighted and made-up for redevelopment, which would involve the establishment, what's called the University Science Center. And so this is the map that how they sort of allocated that particular land. Again like this is a land of people like lived on, right. The communities were already being built, that also was determined not to be in the best interest of those institutions are in its proximity.

[showing music video with audio “Hey, boy, you wanna track?”]

Charles H.F. Davis III: As eviction moratoriums during the Covid 19 pandemic expired, rental assistance programs faltered in Federal Housing and urban redevelopment contracts failed to be renewed. The concern around housing security for black residents in Philadelphia, proximity university campuses. Increased and has been the case historically. Communities have organized to fight for affordable housing and resistance to the rent hikes, property sales and further industrial expansion into residential neighborhoods.

And West Philadelphia specifically, a group of campus and community organizers collectively known as “The Coalition to Save the UC Townhomes”, coalesced in fall 2021 to collectively resist the sale. After reported the last affordable housing complex for black residents in an area historically known as “The Black Bottom” which I just discussed. This coalition is a resident-lead organization working in conjunction with more than 50 allied organizations including, seven based campus student groups from Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Haverford University.

So the video I just showed was from a set of different actions, happened over the course of one year of my field work in Philadelphia. And what is, I think amazing about the campaign that was leveraged, those started in 2021, is something that's still happening in 2023. And so some of the like sort of immediate victories of the work that's been happening, again resident-lead, but student and university. organization supported, has been their ability to sustain and push off the sale of something that was basically ultimately going to be gone. And to still have folks who are being able to fight for their homes in their place. And if you know anything about the affordable housing conversation in Philly, which is not unlike the affordable housing conversation here, right. Routinely, families are displaced without giving as a substantive option in terms of where they can go. Right. At best, they might be given a voucher in a city that doesn't accept vouchers anymore, right?

And the questions that we're sort of raising with regard to this is again, what is the university stake in being able to level this? Right. And what I've learned since I've been here and having come here over a decade. Right. Like one place I always at least walk by or stop by is People's Park. Right. And so you hear that finally, I guess the university has captured it and in whatever ways is decided or someone adjacent to the university thinking about the relationship between university and developers, but also university as a developer, right? Has forced this confrontation, in which people who were for generations were actually already removed from The Black Bottom vis-à-vis this previous redevelopment project are now also being subject to be removed again by some other version of this by a different name.

So there's been. A lot of efforts to resist this. That have happened not just in the community-based context, some of which is alluded to here. But also that they're I think, just had recently ended a sit in by students at the Drexel for Justice Organization. That is very related to the 1967 college sit in that was a big part of what ended up being called the Tripartite Commission, was just Commission between community folks and university folks, and a commitment of $10 million to invest in a community. When you can sort of imagine what happened, sort of the immediate aftermath of that, none of those things move forward, right.  That the community actually was not has not been supported, has been doing this fight for a very, very long time.

So what does this all mean to in the context of abolition? Well, to start, when we think about abolition in the United States, we know it's historically rooted in the abolition of tattle slavery. Right. And and that has its own sort of settler colonial project that is very much not just the foundation of the United States, but the foundation of its institutions, right. The clearest messages of which are still here in the forms of colleges and universities.

And so not only is it about those institutions with regard to the labor specifically that built them, but also the sale of enslaved people, right that subsidized the building of those places. The courting of post-secondary institutions of wealthy white families who themselves were slave owners, or were invested in some way in the enterprise of chattel slavery. That disentanglement runs very, very deep. And as you know, through the various unnaming and renamings that have happened here, right? This is the thing we have yet to sort of contend with and reconcile with, but also that this racial colonial project is not simply a thing of the past. That racial colonialism is a living and breathing thing that continues to show itself in a variety of permutations.

And so what is the counter to that in this particular moment? Well, not surprising, right? There were abolitionists, as we know, right? They were doing all of this work and in the context of college university living, it was in the Midwestern colleges, so. Specifically, in 1834 at Lane Seminary, which is in Cincinnati, Ohio, a well-known abolitionist state. Hosted a series of debates on the topic, “Is it the duty of the people of slave holding states to abolish slavery immediately? After 18 days of debates and round table discussions, the students, Theodore Dwight Weld, a former student and Presbyterian minister, and Overland theology professor Charles Grandison Finney, concluded that slavery should be abolished immediately and Christians should not support the colonization movement which advocated for the return of slaves to Africa. Which we know is like sort of one of the proposed solutions right was, which is not, similar in the various ways we hear about this coming out of Florida and other places of “just going back to your country”. Right, or your continent, If they can decide which Africa actually is in this space.

The conclusion were so radical at the time that they sparked pro slavery riots. And the schools administration attempted to stop students activities. Right. Again thinking about this policing function absent of the formalized police department. 51 students at that time withdrew from Lane moved north Overland, publicly declaring that free discussion with correspondent effort is a duty and of course are right. These ideas actually aligned with abolitionist ethics and evangelicals at the time to colonize the Western states in hopes of swaying public opinion against slave.

So this also now sort of brings to the fore this relation between abolitionism or discontinuity, right between abolitionism and decolonization. Right. That the idea at this point was to continue Western expansion, to colonize those spaces, but to make them sort of abolitionist or free zones. But again, at the expense of who was already living in those spaces. We get into those specifics later.

From the initial base support in New York. Around Hamilton College and the United Institute, which is also very popular at this particular time, anti-slavery academics began establishing communities and colleges and states within a few decades of them entering the union. As examples, Maryville College in Tennessee in 1819, Western Reserve and Ohio in 1826, Illinois College in 1829, Adrian College in Michigan in 1845, and Beloit College in Wisconsin in 1846. The University of Kansas and Washburn University, both in 1865, were also created by abolitionists who had earlier moved to Kansas to influence the vote on whether the state would accept or reject slavery.

There's an amazing book that has recently coming out, that Caleb and I were talking about, that actually have degrees of inequality that show about the abolitionist colleges and specifically the abolitionist colleges compared to case study that would speak more about this in greater depth of how this came to be.

Now, today's abolition, of course, we sort of updated to think about abolition in the afterlife of slavery, right? And the refusal of partial approaches to issues of harm, accountability and restoration. Which are deemed both racially discriminatory and effective. But abolition, as we understand, is not reduced to the project or removal or absence, right? And Ruthie Gilmore talks about this and the idea that abolition is about presence and not absence. It's about the building of life affirming institutions. And so abolition as an intellectual and political endeavor, then seeks to offer alternative frameworks of possibility for thinking of and redressing forms of institutional and interpersonal, outside the logics, surveillance, control and related forms of carceral punishment.

Now in my work is I think about campus abolition, it offer an orienting language that situates the imaginative and experimental work of campus and community organizers, some of which I showed in that video, not merely as a destructive to the institution of policing, but constructive in their effort to imagine and create the presence of life affirming systems and structures of safety and security, grounded in community, not in institutional or resource scribed authority of policing. Abolition also provides a sense of conceptual clarity with regard to the extent to which community centered understandings of safety are wholly and commensurable with institutional standards of security that routinely criminalize black people under the guise of safety and security for white people and white institutions.

So how do we think about this in the contemporary context? Well, first I'm going to start going back to the the mention of Portland State. That in 2014, Portland State initiated its first proposal for establishing an armed Police Department. And an open letter from the faculty from the School of Social Work strongly opposed this measure. Specifically, the letter rebut the university's rationale, which included its urban location and porous campus. Right thinking about those boundaries in relationship proximity to everyday people. That it was open to the public, that there were possibilities of an active shooter. And we can talk a bit about that particular threat of this, which has not been engaged quite meaning. Yet the prevention of campus sexual violence and other crimes, and by articulating the extent to which campus police largely do not prevent any of these occurrences, right.

So let's think. About this right, any of the things that I just mentioned almost never prevented by police, right? And yet they're used as a primary rationale for the over presence of policing, who are policing other things other than the things. The letter also cited campus safety and the Clery data that countered this institutional narrative about campus crime. Again, as I mentioned that the fact that most crime near campus is property related, less than 1%, actually 0.1% of reporting crimes that are categorized as murders or manslaughter actually happened on campus. So thinking about this rationale for violent crime being present. Although the data would suggest that violent crime is not only not happening but is continued to decline over the last two or three decades.

In addition to that, we know that police have a proven track record of being disrespectful in their responses to campus sexual assault survivors, if not themselves. Also, perpetuating various forms of sexual harm for those who have actually reported and Grace Watkins has an amazing expose called the crimes of campus police and the Chronicle for Higher Education that talks specifically about the ways in which campus police have been intimately involved and the retraumatization of survivors, as well as perpetuators of sexual violence against them.

In 2015, at the University of Chapel Hill. And we think about this in the period of 2014 to 2016. There's a groundswell of student activism that's taking place. There was also demands are issued by Black-lead student activist organizations and more than 76 colleges and universities, some of which talked about the issue of policing. But most of them were actually talking about the need for reforming police through completing cultural competence trainings and student inclusion on police oversight. Now we know there's significant limitations right to that particular structure.

But there were other student groups like the organizations at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who demanded specifically that the university defund and disarm its campus Police Department, as well as take action to discontinue what they described as the criminalization of working class, oor and homeless, black and brown people in Chapel Hill and nearby Carrboro.  Stating that policing as an institution must be abolished and must be replaced with restorative and transformative justice practices rather than functioning as a mouth into our penal system. Right. So you. See some differences between how students may be taking up what he's having with policing at this period versus those who may be a little bit more proximal to this idea of abolition of socialization into abolition. They're actually calling for the demand of these places to be defined and disarmed at a time where this was not sort of a common place slogan, right, was not being taken up by those seeking political offices. It was not really a part of the public discourse. Well, significantly radical that we know the limitations of both of those things now.

All good. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. Got to do the work.

 So returning back to Portland State University in 2018. Disarm PSU, which is the primary apparatus by which Portland State was ultimately going to be able to disarm its police. Which we’ll talk about in a second. Assembled as a group of concerned students, faculty and staff, community partners and alumni of Portland State University. Our request, they say, are simple. We are calling for the immediate action to disarm campus security on our campus, reinvest those existing in existing structures and create new investments to address historic racism and anti-black violence at PSU, and reimagine what public safety looks like at PSU through a democratic process of student voting.

So part of what's being alluded to here, right? Is that there has not been a sense of shared governance with regard to issues of public safety and security that in local parentis idea, right that paternalistic nature of its relationship between the institution and the people that are attending that school have largely dictated that they know what's best for us. Right that we are doing this for your own good. And so students saying clearly, well, one we don't agree on what actually it means to be safe or what it means to be secure. And we also not been invited to the bargaining table. And this is a serious point of contention of the bargaining been happening at the University of Michigan at present, and the unwillingness rather of the administration to actually have a conversation about safety and security that's led by students who are saying as instructors we don't feel safe in these particular ways. But also is again levying, not unlike Santa Cruz, right there, police force to sort of squash out any sort of level of dissent that brings attention to this.

Next looking at Minneapolis and University of Minnesota. Of course, we're all aware of what took place in Minneapolis in 2020. And the killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin. But what is less familiar is the University of Minnesota's relationship to Minnesota, or to the Minneapolis Police Department, and the call specifically from student leaders, namely Jael Kerandi, who was the black an undergraduate woman who served as student government president at the time. Who wrote an open letter to the administration demanding that they separate relationship with MPD based on its long standing acts of bigotry and harm against Black University of Minnesota student.

And so it's within this realize we have a protest that this call of action came that was actually responded to in kind, by the then President of the university, to separate relationship with MPD specifically for its external use around canine units, large scale events like sporting events, so forth and so on. But we can think about the immense level of social and political pressure right that creates sort of the conditions that allows for that, to be a thing that happens in the first place.

There was also a commission form or committee formed in this particular place. That was also intended to sort of address this particular this particular issue. But what we also need to remember is that not only was it about NPD's relation with the university, but in fact that the University of Minnesota Police Department was dispatched to Brooklyn Center. Not there far after George Floyd was killed after another killing happened in Brooklyn Center as supplementary support for the municipal police. So again, what is this relationship and how is the university actually being used as simply as this extension or apparatus of carcerality. In large part because the sworn officer of the state, you're beholden to the state when they want to deploy you in the ways that they want you to go in the same way the National Guard can be leveraged at any point in time right by these institutions.

So then we have a question of how is it possible, right that campus police force is working in a municipal capacity, but also the types of weaponry that they are allocated to? Right. The Defense 1033 Program, which some people may be familiar with is a, is a program in which over 100 calls and universities participate, that allows them access to surplus military grade weapons. Right. This is why Ohio State University has performance purposes tank as a part of their policing. What would the college university need a tank for, right? That's emblazoned with the big, you know, OS logo on it to make sure that they know it's ours when it's coming down the street. To deal with again, mostly property issues or damages or alcohol other drug violations.

What also should be known as that within two years of those statements to discontinue its relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, the University of Sensory and ended its relationship. Right. So we talk about these regressions, which I get into it in a bit.

Going back to Portland and the killing of Jason Washington. One of the things that's somewhat interesting about this, right, is that PSU became sort of a site of possibility, right? It moved to disarm its police in 2020. And again large part credit to disarm PSU, and the folks were organizing on the ground. And what the President sort of stated was one of the things we have learned more over time and an important lesson for us is that many of our students from some communities, particularly communities of color and traditionally marginalized communities filled with presence of weapons on campus makes them feel less safe. Right? So this is like an admission of recognition or admission of guilt to a certain extent. So they make this move. They do this like PR campaign, the chief of police has a video. You can still find.

It but about a year from that, they check in. Right, because the Chronicle is doing this reporting, some amazing reporters. Who have been investigating this stuff and they check in. And they asked folks, and the perception is like, well, this is not real? Right. 1. People were still armed on campus and patrolling. 2. We have less confidence this is going to be anything more than sort of PR stunt than it has actually been. And the staff member who's also is an organizer said that they didn't trust this armament would occur by September 1, which is the timeline they had given, And it's a multi-step process that these announcements are made with no real plan in place. Right?

So you have this rhetorical commitment, right to do a thing. That it's actually never intended to do. What Sarah Meds would call it a non-performative right? The institutional statement has the non-performative. And so thinking again about this sort of regressive model of moving back on this discontinuity of rhetoric in 2023. Right. Like within a couple weeks ago that PSU moved to have its campus rearm based on some of the same logics that it presented before with regard to the presence of weapons on campus and its proximity to downtown. And talking with students, they said before I do this, I was definitely more willing to talk to campus police if I had a situation or a problem. If officers do have guns, they might accidentally mistake me for a suspect, but I can also see why somebody would want them carrying it just in case that something happens.

Right. So you see this challenge, right? One of how we're all socialized to conflate the idea of the presence of police with the presence of safety. But also this recognition that often for racial minorities, folks, and other marginal folks. If and when we have called the police, it is likely that when they show up, they're going to see that we are the problem. Going back to this sort of idea of who is to be determined inside or who is to be determined outsider, right? Even if one calls the police to their own home, say, if there's a break in or some version of that right, the questions or the way that you might have to present yourself in that situation to ensure that you're not then victimized in a particular way, or criminalize are the same things that students on campus are thinking about at Portland State currently and a number of the campuses, including Berkeley, and where I'm at Michigan.

So returning back to Philadelphia, I want to raise up the work of Police Free Penn, which was an abolitionist collective that formed right in the wake of what was happening in the racial reckoning over the summer. They think of themselves as a project in an abolitionist assembly that is affiliated and seeking affiliation with students, faculty, staff and workers, and local area residents in proximity to the university. According to their public demands, Police Free Penn’s primary aim is to be in relationship with occupied homelands, excuse me. Primary aim is to abolish policing and transform community safety through a divest invest framework.

 So you heard it earlier, right? We want you to divest your resources, the millions of dollars spending on policing and investing them and creating and supporting strong communities that render policing obsolete. A commitment to community interdependence and being in right relationship with Occupy Homelands at the Lenape people, which is presently known as Philadelphia. Since June of 2020, Police Free Penn worked in collaboration with local communities and abolition collectives like. The Black Philly Radical Collective to c-organize a series of online petitions, mass e-mail campaigns to university leadership, issue position statements and hosted community conversation on public safety, and mount a community poll of residents experiences with UPD.

They also collectively contributed to the mobilizing efforts in response to the afternoon of October 26, in which Walter Wallace Jr., a black man in need of mental health support in West Philadelphia, was instead engaged by and shot by Philadelphia police. Specifically, police repent organized a donation match for the Philadelphia Bail Fund, support protesters, some of whom were students and folks who are attending Penn, but also those who are arrested and detained by the University Police Department, not by Philadelphia PD, well beyond their designated patrols zones, that permeability of boundaries. The day after Wallace was killed in their public statement to the university newspaper. Police repent, doubled down on its commitment, critically reflecting upon and taking critical action and resistance. What we would think about as abolitionist practices in the institution of policing, writing the fatal violence of policing is sustained, it is not an exception, it’s the rule. It is a moral evil that requires our divestment we stand with all those who fight for abolition, including most urgently the Philadelphia,  excuse me, including most urgently in Philadelphia, the visionary demands of the black organizing to Black Philly Radical Collective organized.

[audio from video shown “I’m Andres, I’m with Police Free Penn. It's been a really good day recapping. Like what does? That mean for us here at really what do? What does community say to me? What does caring for each other mean? Community care. And how is it that we can imagine these things? And really make them reality. For ourselves, if we're students like members that. Come in the future and. That are here now. And so I think it's been. A really good event. I think we've had. A lot of like, very different people come. Up and want to get involved? Interested and really passionate about getting West Philly the resources that it serves. And that it had that were. Taken from it. And making sure we both have. Accountable for their investments and for their actions against West Philly and in support of prison, industrial complex and fossil fuels. I don't know. I think there's a lot of hope going around and I. Think that's what? We need and. I'm really excited for what this semester holds for us, for actions and for stuff done. So yeah, thank you.”]

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: So very briefly, because I want to get to the Q and A conversation part of this, I want to give a sort of brief rundown of a forthcoming piece that myself and Jude designed it together around this sort of idea of, like, eight steps toward abolition. And part of that builds on the “8 to Abolition” or a framework that's more popularize the common discourse, but specifically in the context of campus police. And so we're thinking about these moments, both higher education practitioners and policymakers need to explore non law enforcement alternatives to campus safety and well-being right. And I'm thinking about this through the perspective of survival pending revolution, right. This again will be an iterative process in which we have to plan and take deliberate steps that we can take relatively immediately. And so in thinking about. That there are eight steps that were.

Sort of drawing upon thinking about the work of a number. Of people including. Those who did. The competition of its abolition, but also, of course, the work of Critical Resistance, the Cops Off Campus Coalition, Davarian Baldwin Project, ME in Chicago, the Movement for Black Lives, Angela Davis's work, Wilson Gilmore, Rachel Herzing, Mariame Kaba, Dylan Rodriguez, Dean Spade and other folks as well.

So thank you all for coming.

So the first set, of course defund of campus police departments, we've already talked about. So the immense allocation is happening. We can see in some instances that and this interesting move by universities, right, they reclassify this as a Department of Public safety or some name that is not police. Although it's police. And yet 60% usually not, not. Usually into this facility in some instances. Up to 60%. or more of a budget in a public safety earmark is going to policing or security or surveillance of some kind, right? So part of it is the question of  1. why the reclassification? But also what is the proportion of the budget within the safety line item that's actually dedicated to policing and security opposed to other things? That again, is a precondition of safety might otherwise be utilized.

So, of course, defund campus police departments also disarmed demilitarized campus police. Again, what is that severance that needs to happen between its relationship to the federal government and the 1033 Program, but also the extent to which our response is often not appropriate for them. Again, that everyday things that police are called do.

This over reliance on police has had police be people that are stepping in again when we need really like trauma informed or survivor centered care right from actual trained professionals?  And instead of the solution being, let's move to that model. What some institutions have done is, oh, we'll pair them with the trauma informed person. Right. And it's sort of akin to like the social work framework that's that's been developed. But then who we think actually takes precedent or authority in this situation? Right. It's not going to be the trauma informed practitioner, right? It's going to be the person who has the badge and the gun.

So we have to disarm this demilitarized campus police and so much as one they're not responding to things that require. We'd also reassess our safety policies and practices related to police. And so again, in what ways are we deputizing require mandatory reporting things that are also function as police and capacity of people who would exist in that campus personnel category.

We also decriminalize political expression. Again, the rise of the modern police separtment is largely in response to student dissent, right and or faculty. These strikes that we're seeing. So how is it a place that says free speech is a thing that we prioritize? The thing that we value, and yet we're still criminalizing those who are enacting that First Amendment right. And only specific people, right? I mean, like all, seeing what happened to Berkeley, you know, specifically who was allowed to come here, create all the chaos that, It did, and who was left holding the bag, right? And we have another piece of separate with another colleague around this idea of dignitary safety in the way that you know these sort of hate speech masquerading as free speech is an affront to the dignitary safety of those who have been speaking out against it. So decriminalized political expression.

Also eliminate campus stakeholder involvement in policing again, in what ways are we incentivizing right, or requiring those of us to participate in the policing apparatus? How do we establish a sort of transformative justice approaches to some of these issues, which again are sometimes amount to just conduct issues, but also other serious forms of injury and harm that actually take into account what their survivor is do and what they feel is the most appropriate? Because often once it happens, the police get involved, it becomes an investigation. It becomes a matter of the state which is less concerned about what actually happens the individuals who are involved. Because it's so committed to criminalization and punishment, not to restoration repair against survivors deserve when they experience harm.

How do we invest in campus and community care? Again, those are preconditions like counseling and psychological services, right? So the survivor submitter trying and for care for sexual assault survivors,  Remediating it, the high levels of food insecurity that are happening for folks who are on campus, right. Anybody to think of this in the extent to which? Those who don't have access. To food sources like what do they have to then resort to? Whether that's other ways to financially make ends meet that might inquire or might require certain types of activity deemed to be criminal, right. Stealing food from the dining hall, but then they will also be criminalized for so forth and so on. So how do we think about that from a different set of relations?

And we're thinking about abolition, too, is abolition of a particular place, meaning we can't redistribute those resources in a particular way, right? Like there's so much, we'll just take the food example that it's discarded every single day by the university that could definitely be used by the people of Berkeley, right? Or there's so many places that the university owns that is just like vacant property that also could service housing and so forth and so on. Right. How do we think about that level of redistribution from a community and care.

And then minimally right this idea of creating inclusive campus environments, right environments that necessitate less policing of insiders and outsiders are presumed outsiders, but also do not require a certain level of political activity in order for basic needs to be met.

So I'm wrapping up and thinking about this campus abolition conceptualization. As I've been engaged in this work, sort of more intellectually and less pragmatically. My idea was thinking about campus abolition simply as the reimagined presence of higher as a life affirming institution. But it felt like very incomplete and. Part of that I think is that one, it demonstrates certain naivety about higher education as an enterprise, not so much like individual colleges and universities. And we seen examples where college universities have made certain moves that as an enterprise and the other enterprise at that. Is something that really didn't have like an an adequate imagination to fully think about what the practice of study and struggle and service to a broader reimagining of society, and of higher education as otherwise and beyond, right. It was like. Very focused specifically on policing and prisons. And so, for me and thinking about campus abolition. It's less about reimagining higher education, right? I think as an institution. But it's also that, right, it's more about rendering obsolete the conditions in three particular areas, 1. In which knowledge is made into an economy. Right, when we think about credentialism. 2. people are deprioritized in pursuit of profits, productivity and prestige, and 3. post-secondary education is merely a resource for maintaining the status quo of what Bell Hooks taught us is bourgeois white capitalist supremacist patriarchy. So this for me is both in recognition and in material contention with Harney and Moten’s assertion that the university undercommons is an anthropological, non-place of abolition.

So I will stop there and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Are you already ready for questions?

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Jump in wherever you want to get. I don't know if there's like a programmatic. Thing that we're doing or not, but.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: I just got a nod from Caleb. I love this. Thank you very much. In thinking about Berkeley, one of our primary challenges here, you know, seeing, for example, I think it was a PSU call to put things to student vote. This is not actually student body. That would vote for a non-carceral approach and safety, I can say that's actually. And our I think two of the one of our primary impedance is Clery in the sense that that drives the conversation around what is safety and what is crime. And campus here was sued and put under monitorship by the federal government a couple years ago for noncompliance that mostly had to do with reporting. But as a result they've over interpreted what is certainly. A timely warning around an ongoing series campus so we get messages constantly about torque crime happening in our Clery geography, which is big.

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: We've got big, Clery geography. And so like this is something that I’ve butted my head against for years and I don't know if you've seen other folks at other campuses do interesting things with Cleary because it's just suffocating.

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Yeah. So I I haven't. Other than the extent to which like the data? If made transparent or found through other means, just sort of counter narrates right the narrative that the campus wants, and justifying why the police presence is so significant. But again, like it's not that people don't know, right? Like our institutions know and they just refuse. And so I'm challenged by the sort of idea that, like, oh, people just knew or had the data or, like, could read in a particular way, they make a different decision. But part of that is, again like that, that's. Not what's interesting to the institution. So I think that's sort of like a losing approach right or necessary, but insufficient. Maybe that's more appropriate intellectually to say. An unnecessary insufficient approach because it's like beyond that, right? There's like a different sort of moral and political imperative to sort of engage in this type of work in a certain kind of way. See, so I don't know. I don't know. I mean, y'all, maybe the folks who are maybe the furthest ahead on it, but it kind of gets to this point, right. It's like, well, the data isn't intended for us to make decisions by necessarily, right. It's sort of like compliance-based approach to everything. The same thing like equity data generally, diversity data more broadly, is that it's not intended to do the thing that we necessarily wanted to do. It's sort of just like, no, you just have to do this because it's part of the protocol and it's not going to change any of the actual behaviors or habits, but it also drives this narrative that like, which again the data doesn't bear out. But it's just like, oh, this is again, why we need police because of this one singular occurrence of the thing that happened that needs to be reported.

Because the other thing to me, too, maybe this is part of the strategy is thinking about all the ways, not jus, policing is insufficient of addressing the things that Clery reports on, but have the very mechanisms that really should be doing that, or, like woefully insufficient themselves because they're not staffed appropriately, they don't have the proper resources. So what does that mean to, I would say necessarily both and, but if we like forego the policing resistance part alone and then try to do that, invest primarily thing right? Can we build up caps? Can we build up survivor center care? Can we build up, you know. These other sort of things. Would that put us in a better bargaining position to sort of demonstrate this kind of thing?

We're thinking about in Michigan, not in mission, but like at because there's people doing this work right. It's sort of this idea like, OK, well, look, we know abolitionism is like really experiment. So like what is it going to cost you to take a very small portion of this exorbitant budget you're spending on policing to allow us to stand up some of these like, you know, community based or human centric resources? And let's see what happens. Right, because we can attach a research project to that we can see like what the efficacy is going to be on us actually doing this work. And then one we'll have like a better fighting chance of saying like, no, this is an efficacious. You should invest more into. And we don't know they don't necessarily do that. But it's like one small all way that we could say a portion of resources to do things. And again, like students are telling us, that needs to happen, right? The data is saying are being like not supported in an appropriate way. So that might be one of those strategies is like, well, what are those interventions that we could design and set up on campus that we could see, you know, whether they're actually working or not? The consequent right is like, well, if it doesn't go well, then obviously there's the.

Other side that we use. That to the end of them. I just can't imagine it actually wouldn't be utilized in the way that we wanted to because people are asking for it, even those who would say I also want to deal with police. They they don't not want the other things. Right and I think part of it is we funnel so much of the solutions around like what repair and restoration look like is through policing. What else are survivors of violence supposed to do? Wight and many of whom, as I've been continue learning from folks like Jessica Harris, who's the hired scholar at UCLA, Margaret Porter, who's at Penn State, and Chris Linder at Utah, is almost always survivors of campus sexual violence are looking for something that's actually around their care, and it's not policing. But absent of the police report, right, can you get the care that you're supposed to need? No. So we have to sever that carceral entanglement. And so I think thinking through ways, I would say like we're seeing this play itself out both on campus and more broadly, we can maybe advocate for a reallocation of a portion of certain things. Because it also then takes off the responsibility of police having to respond to all the stuff they don't need to respond to, right. The last person I want to see in a mental episode is going to be someone with a badge and a gun. Right, because I'm already going to be feeling a particular type of way and that will only make it worse. So yeah, I wonder what that might look like as a non-law enforcement response to the thing that we're trying to figure out. You may also attach it to the municipality. That's a conversation we're having. Where like the majority of Ann Arbor, even said like we need like a non-lethal, non-armed response in certain situations. So then how then is the university being responsive to the community which is located or operating in by saying, well, the community is already decided we need. To do this. And you're located in the community. What are you doing to actually be, I guess in compliance, right or like doing good stewardship of what people have asked for, about?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: I sadly have to jet. We do have that coming this fall. We've managed to build a crisis response team that isn't based. Out of PD, but we'll see if PD still tries to capture it.

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: For sure for sure. Well, thank you. I appreciate you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Excited for all your work. Thanks for hosting everybody.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Hey, thanks, Mark. I really. Enjoyed your talk. I have a a couple of questions. I really appreciate the scope of your work. Like both time, like kind of geography and how you put it all together. So I really appreciate them and. The two questions I have with one related to your critique of the the school-to-prison pipeline. Umm, I found it really generative. But I have, I'm working how we can work certain things in that were captured by the school-to-prison pipeline. And need to be worked into this carceral continuum. And so I'm thinking of a special Ed-to-prison pipeline, particularly amongst criminalising particularly black people of color males, people, special educational needs, people with disabilities. Solutions, I mean, I know Caleb's works, and this is particularly. You know, we terrorize folks until they need to go on medical leave. We terrorize folks until they need to be 5150 need to be 5000 we terrorize them until. I mean think of the black female faculty on campus, who are infertility because of this right. It's not talked about researchers in there. So I'm wondering how? The carceral continuum can hold the way we treat people with disabilities? Can hold the way we terrorize people? Can hold the way we manufacture infertility amongst our young faculty and researchers? That's one side of it. And the second side of it is. I grew up in the UK, I went to University in the UK. We've been probably in the long history. I never saw a police officer on my campus once. Not once. I remember we had we were, you know, 2017. We had multiple terrorist threats. I never saw a police officer once. There was a bomb scare on our campus. I saw fire engines. I. Didn't see a police car. Right. But the way it looks in the UK in terms of carceral geographies is immigration. Yeah, right. And so I'm wondering if we were to take the scope of your work and make it global. In the UK, it's immigration here it's carceral. I'm wondering what are these kind of global fanatics connected to the way we theorize higher education connected to this kind of industry and commercialization of like research interests that apply both in America and the UK, Caribbean, Africa. Those are my two questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: Can I have a question to his that one the same, yeah. I think there's something more touching on that’s the same. Kind of, hat's like the broader anti-blackness of campus. And I feel like the in the present in the U.S., the policing is one of the mechanisms through which it perpetuates itself. But I think whilst getting at. There are also all of the other mechanisms, so. If tomorrow we managed to remove campus from police, would that mean that campuses wouldn't be anti-black anymore and? I think that you know, so one that's I think tied into. A lot of the things that Paul was talking about, but. I feel there's a lot of very silent ways that the campus is anti-black as well, and those show up in things like, I think attainment gaps where you see people getting graded lower for behavior, but that can be racialized

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Always. For sure.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: that being. Late for class. Or, you know, like smaller things like that and.

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: That's so that's still so central. To racial capitalism, though, because that creates us an opportunity when we leave campus, for the kind of material like that can. Live and so on. So yeah, I. Guess what about all of those other silent violences and also? Like things like, the work culture that's here, that's not always welcoming. If you're, if you're a black student. Coming from outside the U.S. and so.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: On it's like less spectacular forms of violence.

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: Yeah. So I think what's important about this right is like abolitionism's aren't like silver bullets, right? Like they don't address all of the different things and have to work in relationship to other things, right? And other ways of theorizing other ways of making sense of like these various sort of, you know, the violence of abstraction that say, Hartman sort of talks about and also these, you know, less explicit forms of violence.

I think one that's important in reference and recognizing that 1. abolition is whatever abolition is. We can broadly define that in a bunch of different ways, but it's not decolonization, right. It's not anti-racism. It's not any of these particular things. But then what does it afford us to think about those things in relationship to one another, right? So like we were having sort of a conversation about sort of what does it mean to then take up decolonization from a specifically like landback position that also needs to reckon with sort of abolitionism in a particular way? And how policing is an intimate part of this, like border patrolling in both literal and figurative Borderlands. You have to have a conversation about those things together, right? But there's also a racial dynamic that seems implicit with abolition. In the U.S., right, because of its particular route. But also because of how abolition becomes taken up well, say by intellectuals, right and academics and institutions, right, it becomes for the next thing from like a diversity, anti-racism and like abolition or decolonization, is like the thing that soon will have no meaning whatsoever.

I think part of it is knowing that as a political analysis, it's got to be in conversation with multiple ways we understand how harm and violence take place. I think what abolition also, though, affords us right, is that it's not just about not that these things necessarily are not just for the use of critique, but like the facilitation of imaginative understandings and world makings? That with those other things and say, well, what does it mean to make an anti-racist world. That's both like an anti-racist and an abolitionist project. That couldn't happen in one way where you couldn't actually have an anti-racist world and void of abolition. And abolition can't be present, devoid of like anti-racism, right or being like pro-feminists or. All these other sort of things. So I think that's one part is like not asking abolition to do more than. Anyone other thing? Can't do on its own. And I think that's usually what people have as a response, right. Because the first thing that someone that doesn't believe in abolition or like. Has a hard time. getting it.  Right, it's like, what are we going to do about this, right? Or what about X instead of understanding, like it's an invitation that we can like figure this out. Like slowly but surely. So I think there's that.

When I think about in like the global context, but I think one it's understand that unique sort of contextual relationship to issues of incarceration, to issues of harm and violence. And even if it's through the lens of colonialism, right? Like policing is like very much still a racial colonial project and has always been a colonial project in some form or fashion. Whether you've had many constables that function in like a different way than. Say modern police in the United States. But in the U.S., it has to be connected to again chattel slavery, because the first you know imminence of policing emerges from slave patrols. So okay, then what is now the sort of ways in which people who are presumed not to be a part of the UK then become police, either through immigration or presumed immigration, right? Even if you're multiple generations there, it's like, well, you know, you're not us. There's some version of that, right. You're not really British, you're not really that, but you're not really the other thing either. And so this insider, outsider negotiation or policing of identity. Becomes, I think, central to a conversation of how we didn't take up abolition as it relates to what, what is identity and conversation with abolition? Or what is national identity relationship to racial, ethnic identity? And how does that look different across these contexts? So part of it is that conversation and to be sure, like abolition and decolonization, have always been global struggles, right? Like this is why conversations always happen in multiple places with multiple stakeholders.

We had an amazing talk by Mark Lamont Hill, relation, in relation to black Palestinian solidarity, and he was sort of charting this genealogical relationship, you know, emerging many, many years, but principally especially from the Panthers, in which they were actually like Panthers like. A Panther as a symbol, but also like the Panthers established in Palestine by black Palestinians that traversed that sort of geopolitical boundary at this time where you didn't have the connectivity that we have now. Right. So I think one is recognized that these things already exist. They just look different. And I think trying to fit. Say like an international or geopolitical context, it is not the U.S., and the way we think about abolition here. It wouldn't necessarily be helpful. But it would also be really limiting if the representation of that is like we don't have police on campus. It's like, what do you have? Like who's doing the policing of some way, shape or form that determines insiders and outsiders? Right. Who is patrolling the boundaries, determining those boundaries? Or how are the boundaries communicated to people who are not enrolled? Right. I don't know what the face of a public institution might look like, say in the UK, in large part because of its like significantly longer history of post-secondary education. But there's absolutely something that's happening. Right. There's a certain, thing about people that are in communities proximal to those institutions that know it's not for them, right? Who's communicating that? Sometimes it can be in the rhetoric or the communications of an institution. Sometimes it can be from people who have become or presumed to see themselves as insiders, who were once outsiders that also enforce those boundaries. But it's also just the harm at the institutional level that that apparatus enacts on communities, right? Is it acquiring property? Is it becoming landlord? Is becoming the primary job provider that also is linked to health insurance, right? Again, I'm not sure about the architecture, but there I think types of questions that we might ask that says that there are some similarities even if there are some differences in the specificity that it, it actualizes.

I think the other part of your question, if I was understanding correctly, is like sort of where does say disability justice fit into the context of abolitionist conversation? And again, like abolition doesn't exist, avoided disability justice, in the same way racial justice couldn't exist and devoid disability justice. Because these intersections right are deeply shaping the unique experiences of people who live at them. And so when I think about the school-to-prison pipeline sort of relationship, I think it does contend with and confront sort of like how special education and criminalization through special education is a form of product of that school-to-pipeline. With the continuum is trying to sort of disrupt is this idea that school is a thing that introduces people to prisons, right? Opposed to the way that schools can in some ways function very similar to prisons right through its policing behavior and its ability to arrest and punish, but also how schools operate in the context of carceral spaces.

Julissa Muñiz, who's an amazing scholar who's at UT Boston doing a postdoc, and it is, I think leading to take a different job, actually does critical ethnographic research in juvenile detention facilities that have schools in them. Right. Which is also like we don't always think about that like that. You know, detention centers have schools, right? Or that like there are schools that have like carceral spaces, specifically where like whether it's in school suspension or some other forms. So it's trying to like more elucidate how these things are related to one another, and it's not one feeding into the other and it's not like this linear progression of [clinking sound] troubled individual student who's like behavior escalates to a point that we have to then engage with the police. But thinking about in some ways, how does the school displace these children into situations that render them vulnerable to police contact? Right. Like one of those examples.

Thank you so much. For coming.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Thank you.

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III: One of those examples I think in part is thinking about like suspensions and expulsions. A lot of suspensions happen for students based on truancy, right, which is like them not coming to school. And somehow we figure that the solution to students not coming to school is to like, formally ban them from coming to school in. The first place. So what are you supposed to do, right? You're a 10, 11-year-old kid, right? Mother has to work 2. Shifts wherever you're just left to your own devices in whatever city you're from. You're going to do it like 10, 11, 12, 13 year-old kids do. Like you're just going to get into some. Right. Well, you're just going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time because you're supposed to be in school because it's compulsory thing. And now I'm going to criminalize because. You're not in school, but you were suspended from school in the first place. Right. So I think like all of that leaves space for engaging how special education or the over representation of certain kinds of folks in special education, and the criminalization of folks with disabilities in general, plays into this sort of like continuum because again like. It can go beyond the college university. You can go straight from occasional system of that into a society of that or into a school or university of that, and then also back into society of that. So I think there is space and you know I think that's and this is part of that invitation is like how would somebody who's already engaged in that discourse take up abolition in the specific context of understanding its relationship to. Say special education.

ROSALIE FANSHEL: So I think that we should formally wrap up.  There is a class meeting.

CHARLES H.F. DAVIS III:: For sure.

ROSALIE FANSHEL: This was kind of awesome. I invite us all to give a huge Thank you.