Reorientation

UW-Madison Center for Campus History
Reorientation

From the UW-Madison Center for Campus History, Reorientation is a podcast exploring the history of UW you won’t get on your campus welcome tour. Each season takes a deep dive into a historical topic that sheds light on the university's past and helps explain its present. Season 1: Campus Police — What's their deal? How did UW–Madison and hundreds of other universities across the country end up with their own deputized law enforcement agencies? And what does their existence mean for the communities they police, both on and off campus?

Episodes

  1. NOV 25

    Who Gets A Say In Safety?

    This season we’ve looked at more than 100 years of campus police history. But what about the present? What does having a full-blown law enforcement agency on campus mean for both the UW and the broader Madison community today? And what would it look like to imagine a future of campus safety without campus police?

    27 min

  2. NOV 18

    Codified Cops

    It’s taken us five episodes, but we’ve finally gotten to the moment when UW-Madison campus police became real, official law enforcement. To understand how that happened, though, we need to talk about some wild 60’s protests and an unsolved murder.

    25 min

  3. NOV 18

    The Morality Police

    Ticketing cars or busting up parties is one thing. But the history of policing behavior on campuses also includes much darker chapters. At UW-Madison, campus police and administrators led a 15-year shadow operation to purge gay men from the university.

    23 min

  4. NOV 13

    The Wild Wild Midwest

    Episode 3: What happens when people who aren’t cops start acting like cops? In some cases, they turn into cops. In the decades after WWII, UW-Madison saw its security operation grow from a handful of guards into a full-fledged department, seizing more and more authority to police behavior on campus.

    19 min

  5. NOV 13

    Secret Police

    Episode 2: Dueling detective agencies. Undercover sting operations. A string of attacks on campus kept under wraps. We’re going back to 1911, way before there was even a concept of campus police, to see where some very early seeds about police power, campus safety, and university priorities were being sown.

    22 min

  6. NOV 4

    Real Cops

    Episode 1: What’s the deal with campus police? Hundreds of universities in the US have their very own law enforcement agencies. But where did they come from? On the first episode of this season, we go from the days of night watchmen to the turbulent 1960’s and up to today to figure that out.

    17 min
  • 6 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

From the UW-Madison Center for Campus History, Reorientation is a podcast exploring the history of UW you won’t get on your campus welcome tour. Each season takes a deep dive into a historical topic that sheds light on the university's past and helps explain its present. Season 1: Campus Police — What's their deal? How did UW–Madison and hundreds of other universities across the country end up with their own deputized law enforcement agencies? And what does their existence mean for the communities they police, both on and off campus?

Information

  • Creator
    UW-Madison Center for Campus History
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © UW-Madison Center for Campus History
  • Show Website
    Reorientation

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