Introduction
The modern world is highly divided. Activists and protesters in the present moment agitate for improving working conditions and public infrastructure as well as against fossil fuel industries and environmental destruction.
Advocates have been insisting on police reform, even the abolition of the police, since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but their outcry grew even more urgent after Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, and then again after police killed George Floyd in 2020.
The call for shrinking the stronghold of policing in everyday life has reached many quarters, including K–12 schools, health institutions, and colleges and universities.
The Cops Off Campus movement led to academic inquiry and student and labor mobilization.
It also forced policy reform in colleges and universities.
Such reforms acknowledged the harm police inflict on students of color, particularly Black students, and the role policing plays within larger forces of deeply rooted structural racism in higher education.
Universities and colleges also examined diversity and inclusion anew as a way of creating a more welcoming environment for Black students.
These ideals espoused by college administrators following the rebellious summer of 2020 were quickly tested. Ethnic studies is under attack, academic freedom is at risk, and even weak diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are being scaled back.
Moreover, in April and May 2024, university
campuses across the world witnessed university administrators meet the wave of student encampments protesting higher education’s investments in Israel’s military industries with repressive and violent police sweeps.
The photographs flashing across news feeds and social media were vivid: campus and local police in black riot gear, marching in formation on campuses across the country to flatten tents and eject students.
Police made over 3,500 arrests.
They brutally broke up encampments, removed students from occupied buildings, managed crowd dispersals, arrested and transported protesters, locked students out of dorms, and processed them for criminal offenses.
The world witnessed police behave precisely as university administrators knew (or should have known) they would. In general, police acted as police, enforcing the laws, policies, and norms of institutions. No longer could we hold the image of university police as benevolent security forces with friendly relationships with students, controlled by academic administrators and trained to work within a college environment.
The protest events of the 2023 to 2024 academic year also reminded some observers and commentators of student protests in the mid-1960s to early 1970s and the divestment campaigns against South Africa’s apartheid government.
While some seek to distinguish the past from present—claiming the past eras were less repressive and the causes more just, or more sympathetic to university officials
—this Piece instead aims to excavate the connections between past and present responses to student protests. It specifically focuses on the student protest movements of the mid-1960s to early 1970s: demands to end the Vietnam War and war industry research, create Black and Ethnic Studies departments, and prevent the enactment of urban renewal plans that displaced Black working-class communities. This Piece focuses on this period for a few reasons. By some measures, the scale of pro-Palestine student protest is likely greater than any of the movements between then and now,
and campus police agencies as they exist today formed in response to the widespread activism in that period. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, universities across the United States tasked local and state police officers with controlling college campuses and disrupting public dissent, sometimes unnecessarily and violently.
As this Piece explains, during the student protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, administrators and university presidents faced intense economic and political pressure to quash the escalating mobilizations. Heads of universities faced strong criticism and threats of (or actual) reprisal for inaction or delayed action.
States and administrators rushed to create in-house campus police forces that answered to the heads of universities, in part to avoid the type of police violence that led to incidents such as the Kent State massacre.
With campus police came codes of conduct, disciplinary processes, and criminal laws all aimed at diminishing and deterring student and faculty protest.
Colleges and universities are today using and expanding upon the structures built in that past protest era. Numerous universities have wielded the threat of their full disciplinary and carceral influence—disciplinary hearings, suspension, campus bans, policing, social media monitoring, high tech surveillance, and criminal prosecution—in their responses to pro-Palestine activity.
Students and employees are now subject to police threats and violence along with school disciplinary actions. Police—usually campus police—provide the evidence and factual basis for codes of conduct hearings, and students and employees have little due process or appeal rights.
From late spring to early fall 2024, schools across the country issued new restrictive time, place, and manner (TPM) policies with provisions, for instance, requiring longer periods of notice for a broader range of activities.
These policies—aimed at quelling pro-Palestine student protests and speech—combined with threats of police violence on the one hand and lack of protection from counter-protesters on the other to coerce many in the campus community into silence and inaction.
Today, forty-seven states and the District of Columbia have enacted one or more statutes authorizing campus police.
Colleges and universities host more than 1,700 police agencies,
and 95% of four-year institutions with 2,500 or more students operate their own campus police forces.
Campus police are largely modeled after municipal police with paramilitary rank structure, specialization, top-down communication, distinctive badges and uniforms, and weapons like firearms and batons.
Data from 2021 to 2022 for schools serving more than one thousand students show a total budget of around $2.7 billion for campus police forces,
which will likely grow given the munition and police personnel increase in the last year.
Ninety-five percent of law enforcement agencies serving four-year schools authorize their full-time sworn officers to carry handguns.
These full-fledged police agencies are integrated into school operations through crisis management, Title IX investigations, threat assessments,
housing security and evictions, and code of conduct charges brought by deans of students’ offices.
Heads of the nation’s institutions of higher education are now confronting political pressure and threats of funding cuts from all sides, echoing the challenges faced by their predecessors in the mid-1960s to early 1970s. Administrative leaders must also address the potential for security concerns from protesters, who may destroy property or prevent full access to university grounds or classrooms,
and navigate liberal constituents from within and outside the university.
In the face of funding cuts and attacks from the Right,
even public universities in liberal states find themselves relying on tuition, donors, endowed positions, and private investments, all of which threaten to erode an ideal vision of institutions of higher education as spaces of equity, academic freedom, and debate, free from outside interests and corporate capture.
Both past and contemporary protest movements have seen few political elites standing up for student protesters, especially once their tactics escalate to disruptive conduct and meaningful property damage.
This Piece, however, reveals examples of administrators working with students to avoid arrests—for some leaders know such scenes can radicalize students, embolden police to take even more repressive actions, and alienate large swaths of students (future alumni donors).
School administrators and lawmakers are poised to use the current wave of pro-Palestine student mobilization to boost funding and police personnel while expanding their surveillance apparatuses, increasing criminal consequences for protest activity, creating more stringent protest rules, and enlarging protest-related codes of conduct and disciplinary consequences.
This Piece shows the historic complexity behind decisions to wield state power through campus police, and both the internal and external demands on universities to restrict the time, place, and manner of student protests.
The connections between local police and police embedded within institutions—like colleges and universities—are negotiated through Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) and Mutual Aid Agreements.
But deciding when and how to utilize police and whether to call on local police instead of or alongside campus police involves a mix of politics, capacity, and stakeholder influence. For example, university presidents faced considerable pressure from, among other sources, federal lawmakers and state legislatures to eliminate the spring 2024 encampments and quash protected pro-Palestine speech.
A better understanding of the coercive influence of political and economic concerns is critical for balancing interests and determining what role police should play on campuses, and whether they belong there at all.
This Piece proceeds in four parts. Part I is a reminder that the conflicts and struggles faced by today’s administrators echo those of their predecessors. By focusing on another period of large-scale student activism—the mid-1960s to early 1970s—this Piece shows how campus police grew in authority and numbers in response to protests during this time and how codes of conduct were expanded to more explicitly address unrest and free speech activity.
Part I also illustrates how the pressure applied today to silence and stop student mobilization at universities—legislative threats and funding cuts—was also present during this earlier time period.
Part II analyzes ninety-six state and federal antiprotest legislative proposals and enactments since October 7, 2023, using an antiprotest legislation database maintained by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. It showcases the political and economic pressures weighing on the heads of universities as they determine whether to permit or limit certain types of protest and speech. Although much of this fervor has emerged as a response to pro-Palestine activity, the same legislation will no doubt apply and expand in response to agitation around other progressive and left-leaning causes in the future.
Part III demonstrates how protest policing functions through embedded campus police and their connections to local police. It maps how police and administrative leaders network and share information to enhance surveillance and how campus police are an integral part of university code of conduct and discipline processes. Some have criticized universities for using disciplinary processes in the context of protests; even an administrative sanction can deter legitimate First Amendment speech activity.
Part IV excavates some examples of past and present university administrators choosing not to use police when faced with large-scale campus protest. This shows that even in moments of heightened political and economic pressure, some leaders make different decisions.
Stepping back, this project sits within the larger context of university policing in the lives of students, workers, and community members. This Piece focuses on the levers that grow policing on campuses. Student protest movements can balloon the authority and resources for campus police, but any surge in campus police as regulators of protest demands will carry ripple effects for other uses of police. For example, university administrators use campus police to quash labor actions and disrupt picket lines when university workers decide to strike.
Race and education scholars have long criticized campus police departments’ actions, such as targeting investigative resources toward Black and Latinx people on campus, as contributing to unbelonging for those students and employees.
Campus police also extend their reach to areas surrounding the formal campus boundaries, purportedly to uphold legal obligations to provide and maintain campus safety, but also to retain university land holdings and keep low-income or unhoused neighbors out.
In addition, while this Piece focuses on certain time periods, it is important to acknowledge the rich tradition of student protests on the left before and after the mid-1960s to early 1970s. Students fought U.S. involvement in Central America, university investments in South Africa’s apartheid government,
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
wealth hoarding during Occupy Wall Street,
and sexual violence on college campuses.
They sought nuclear disarmament,
ethnic studies departments,
divestment from fossil fuel industries
and sweatshops,
solidarity with the Black Lives Matter
and #MeToo movements,
Cops Off College Campuses,
and, even before October 2023, divestment from the Israeli military.
This Piece connects the past era of protest to recent years of student activism, framing the movements of the late 1960s, not as a comparison, but as a springboard for what is unfolding today.
Finally, the focus on the Left and progressive causes is not to suggest the Right or conservative movements are not active on college campuses. Although worthy of its own study, the Right seems to use different tactics than traditional protest and demonstration, such as inviting controversial speakers to college campuses. In such instances, under prevailing views of the First Amendment, universities must take reasonable steps to accommodate speakers, which often means engaging police and private security at considerable costs to protect provocative speakers from disruptors.
These practices were shored up during Donald Trump’s first administration, when a wave of antiprotest legislation—often taken from model legislation drafted by the Goldwater Institute—focused on protecting conservative speakers from public disruption, specifically on college campuses.
Moreover, while growing systems of protest policing at universities may also increase police surveillance of student groups on the right, the asymmetry in tactics and disruption leads to different consequences. Some groups operate under the threat of violence and intrusion for their protest tactics, while others seem to receive protection from colleges.