Erin Corbett:
If we continue to do bad policy and enact bad policy and procedures, we will continue to have the same tragic situations and circumstances that litter our newsfeeds, our timelines, our television day in and day out with no respite for any of us. In addition, if we are only going to make reactive changes, we are only addressing symptoms of the root cause of the issue. It is as if you know, someone has a cold and you are just going to give them Kleenex for their runny notes, not going to do anything to address maybe, you know, a virus or anything else that is causing this runny nose. You’re just like, here’s some Kleenex. It’s also only half ply. So it’s not going to work that well, good luck may the odds be ever in your favor? And so, you know, we have to understand that these reactionary solutions are incomplete and they’re beneath us.

Erin Corbett:
If we’re going to be honest about this conversation, those of us that are in higher ed, whether we are professors, instructors, researchers, student leaders, some combination of all of the above reactionary solutions are beneath us. And we need to do better as individuals we need to do better collectively. And we need to be our colleagues to do better.

Heather Shea:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs Now. I’m your host, Heather Shea. Today on the podcast, we are discussing campus policing and student activism for black and brown lives with scholars, activists, and students. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations, make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. And we release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, you can find us at studentaffairsnow.com or on any of the social media channels. This episode is brought to you by Stylus publishing stylist is proud to be a sponsor of the Student Affairs Now podcast. Browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com.

Heather Shea:
You can also use the promo code SANow for 30% off all books plus free shipping. You can find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter at Stylus pub. This episode is also sponsored by Anthology. Transform your student experience and advanced co-curricular learning with Anthology Engage. With engage. You are able to easily manage student organizations, efficiently plan events, and truly understand student involvement to continuously improve your engagement efforts at your institution. Learn more by visiting anthology.com/engage. As I mentioned, I am your host, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she, her, and hers and I am broadcasting from East Lansing, Michigan near the campus of Michigan State University. MSU occupies the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Peoples. Before I introduce our panelists today in full transparency, I want to make a quick statement about my own positionality for those who are listening, not watching.

Heather Shea:
I identify as a white cisgender woman, and I’m also the daughter of a former police Sergeant. It’s been nearly 20 years since my dad retired, but he and I have had several long conversations about murders of black and brown people at the hands of police officers. And he agrees with my anger. I wonder if maybe it’s time to not just rethink or tweak, but drastically limit or eliminate law enforcement from our campuses. There are multiple conversations going on around the country, and many of them carry high emotional weight. We as Student Affairs Now have a platform to explore this topic from a singular perspective abolition. And I’m thrilled to have a panel today to address this head-on. What would removing police present from college and university campuses look like when we say defund the police, what does that mean? This is all while I am excited about the people who joined me on the podcast today.

Heather Shea:
So these four individuals are sharing space with me. Each of you brings a fantastic and unique vantage point on the movement for racial justice. So joining me are Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III, an Assistant Professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, where his work broadly focuses on race and racism and where he serves as the principal investigator for the hashtag police free campus project. Charles introduced me to the other three panelists, Dr. Erin Corbett, the CEO of second chance educational Alliance and the coordinator of the Quinnipiac University prison project. Jude Paul Dizon is a doctoral candidate in the urban education policy program at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. His dissertation is a case study of campus policing. And Jael Kerandi, I hope I’m saying that correctly. Was I close, okay. The student body, president and current ranking representative to the University of Minnesota Board of Regents. Welcome to each of you. I’m looking forward to hearing from each of you. And as you introduce yourself, if you could please tell us a little bit about your interest in and work around this topic. And we’re going to start today with Charles.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Oh, well, thank you Heather so much for having this conversation for inviting us into having this conversation. And I’m just so thankful for my colleagues who thought to join us who brings such expertise in a variety of areas that I think are really critical for us to discuss. So I was actually introduced to the topic through my work as a community organizer and as an activist. I had been doing quite a bit of work through local Black Lives Matter chapters through the gym defenders down in Florida. That really got me interested in the notion of abolition in the context of policing, but as a higher education scholar more and more, it was becoming important to me to think about what does this mean for colleges and universities. And so part of that led to an op-ed that both Jude and I were able to co-author that really stemmed from the work that Jael had already been doing at the University of Minnesota that raised sort of this recurring point in higher education history and that anything that has been progressive with regard to broadly, as we frame diversity equity inclusion has really been the result of campus and community organizers.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
And so very much, you know, a part of that is to carry on my own work and thinking about how student activism is happening in today’s world, how digital technologies are being leveraged, both with regard to expanding political education opportunities to developing solidarities within and across campuses and how that all has sort of manifested in this as we’re calling it the Black Lives Matter moment.

Heather Shea:
Thanks so much for being here. I am really grateful that we have such great activism happening in the state of Michigan, and it was good to see you on the front page of the Chronicle the other day as well. So Dr. Corbett, AIG of tell us more about you. Hello.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
Absolutely. Hello Heather, thank you so much for having me and Charles, thank you so much for thinking of me and the work that happens in the higher ed in prison space. I come to so much of this work through personal reasons. So my work in prison education, higher ed in prison is both personal and professional. I have several family members and friends and folks in the community who are just as impacted whether they have been incarcerated are currently incarcerated, have been on some sort of community supervision, the impact of law enforcement and its overreach is just so prevalent in so many of the communities. The other piece that that brings me to this work was my experience working with the Katal Center for health, equity, and injustice which is a community organizing organization that focuses at state level work in Connecticut and New York.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
And it was through working there with Lorenzo Jones, who was a long time, long time organizer here in Connecticut and Gabriel Sayegh, who did a long, long stint at DPA before branching out on his own. Those are the two folks who really help form the foundation of how I think about organizing and activism within the context of college in prison, how to approach that from a liberatory mindset and how to talk to incarcerated students who who are under a lot of other oppressive structures then free world students. And so that presents a lot of difficulty. When we talk about activism, how do they find themselves to be civically engaged and how do we work around, you know, sort of the, the barriers that are put up in their way. And so, so much about all of that is, is why I’m happy to be here today. Thank you.

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much for being here, Jude Paul.

Jude Paul Dizon:
Yes. Thank you. Good morning. Yeah. Thank you so much, Heather, for having me on and Charles, thank you for bringing me in. And Erin and Jael, your work also inspires me as well. Awesome. So think grateful to share space with everyone this morning. So again, my name is Jude pronouns. Are he, him. And for me, you know, what led me to start thinking about policing and higher ed started when I was a practitioner. So prior to my doctoral studies, I worked for five years in student affairs primarily in a multicultural center type position. And it was in 2014 that a student of mine at the time he was a third year undergraduate black male student. He came to my office one day, and this is like in early February. And he told me how during, while he was on campus during, for like the winter semester that he was taking a course in January, that he had been stopped and detained by campus police officers, that he was questioned, whether he had stolen a phone and then was subsequently brought into the station and detained there for several hours and then released without much of any kind of like explanation or apology.

Jude Paul Dizon:
And for me, you know, the student always, whenever I saw him, he was always dressed in a blazer, a button up shirt of some kind that was always like his look. And and I’m not sure whether he was trying to like maybe contrast that. But I remember that when he told me this story, he came to my office. He told me that that day on campus, that he was stopped by the police, that that was the day that he chose to wear more casual clothes. And so, you know, for me, I think as a student affairs educator, you know, I took the time to listen, ask him how I could support him. You know, I think at that time he had you know, emotionally managed himself. I wanted to let you know me know cause we had already had this ongoing relationship.

Jude Paul Dizon:
And that was kind of like in the moment I was like, you know, I think, you know, I did, you know, what I could do in that moment, but I left thinking like being, feeling jarred and thinking about how you know, I advise him, I listened to him, but I also am in a role where I’m supposed to call the campus police and I’m supposed to utilize the campus police for various types of situations. And that had been my training as a student affairs practitioner. And so I had this moment of realization of, yeah, again, what I never really questioned as an expectation of my job. And I began to think about you know, how does that fit when I also, at the same time, I’m critical of policing that I’ve been critical of policing often society off campus.

Jude Paul Dizon:
But I realized in that moment of talking to my student that I had this maybe contradictory relationship with policing on campus where I could be critical, but yet I’m expected to call them. And I never questioned that. And so realizing that I had this I suppose like unexamined area of my practice unsettled me greatly. And I continued to feel unsettled by that. And because of that discomfort, when I started my graduate program, I decided to think about, well, how could I better advance racial justice and higher ed? And I began to look more into the literature on campus policing which has led me to further look at that, collaborate with folks like Charles. I’m kind of excited to get to talk with you today about what I’ve come to learn and reflect upon as well. Thank

Heather Shea:
You so much. It’s great to hear that background story cause that tension moment often provide that research question. Right. So excited to hear more about your dissertation work. Jael welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Tell us about your work in and around Black Lives Matter and policing.

Jael Kerandi:
Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me here today Heather and Thank you Charles for looping me into this conversation. My name is Jael Kerandi and I use pronouns like she and hers and they think when I think of kind of campus policing, I don’t think it started as maybe my understanding of how it applied to higher education, but rather I can remember when Trayvon Martin was murdered and just feeling very helpless in that moment and wondering how this translated to other areas of life, like where I remember the time my parents were not comfortable with me protesting. They’re like, I don’t want you out there. And I just remember thinking like, what can I do? Like, what am I supposed to do? What am I, where’s my role in this process? And you know, you look back at 99 was Rodney King and things like that happening.

Jael Kerandi:
And I was about one at the time and now looking at Trayvon Martin and still being kind of in middle school at the time and then getting on campus and seeing these different things continuously happen. But the moment I think I realized the issue higher education didn’t get to be siloed was when we had our own issues on our own campus. And I was asking our student affairs leaders, what are we going to do about this? Like students are telling you they don’t feel safe. What are we going to do about this? And it felt like I was asking the same question and nobody not even didn’t have the answer, but wasn’t even ready to have a conversation about nobody was ready to talk about that. This was actually an issue on our campus because the students that were saying it were an issue, we’re such a small percentage, right?

Jael Kerandi:
Like everybody else on the aggregate maybe felt safe. But this small section of students was saying this and it was very frustrating to continue to hear that. And when the murder of George Floyd happened, you know, 15, 20 minutes from campus, I was like, you don’t get to be silent about this anymore. Right? We don’t get to not have an answer. We don’t get to not have a conversation. In fact, those moments have long gone and passed at this point, you need to do something because this is happening right next to your campus. And if your values are what they say they are, then you’re going to take action on these matters.

Heather Shea:
Having a student leader in the middle of this conversation today, I think is really powerful because we often talk around and about students, but hearing your exact experiences. I’m so grateful that you’re here as well. So Charles let’s begin by talking about the movement and its origins. I think some might be thinking, oh, abolish the police is a new movement for racial justice, but the conversation has been obviously going on for a long time. And it’s hard to understand our present without looking back at the history of the, of the police on our college and university campuses and how that is constructed. So can you give us a bit of background about the conversation when it began and a little bit about the role of police in higher ed history? I guess.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Yeah. Great question. So I think, you know, historians have this understanding as they articulated of presentism and that we often see things kind of, as they are devoid of the larger historical context right or how some CRT scholars might think this is like a historicism to some extent, and a lot of the conversation, not just about policing as an institution, but about abolition and about defunding is often devoid of this larger sort of historical context. And so one of the things that we know through the work of a number of community-based scholars, as well as historians who have documented the relationship is that the fundamental understanding of abolition, at least in this country is deeply tied to the abolition of slavery. And so when we think about the relationship with the police, that primarily is generated as a sort of runaway slave patrol, then we see that there is a clear relationship with the founding of this nation.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
One, that’s obviously grounded in the indigenous genocide and dispossession of land from indigenous peoples through the enslavement of Africans. And the state, if you will, at that time, using a law enforcement like structure to continue to enforce those sets of power relationships. And so when we think about the abolitionist movement, we know perhaps the most prominent abolitionists of them all, Harriet Tubman who we often celebrate and talk about in particular ways that often are devoid of nuance, but also the number of other abolitionist organizations from the south through the north being at a place like Michigan, we know that, you know, this was a sort of place that led to the departure of many folks to get free into Canada, right? We have this beautiful Memorial downtown Detroit sort of symbolizes that. And so abolitionism both involve certainly individuals who demonstrate a level of courage of bravery, but also networks of individuals who are committed to this cause of one thing, generally that enslavement in and of itself as an institution that has no place to be here, right.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
If we recognize and understand us all be human beings but more importantly that there is something that we can do about that, right? Whether that is in an effort to reduce some level of harm or to eliminate some from the harm to help people circumvent what we could easily understand today as a, as a type of state violence. And so I think we have to make those historical connections very, very clear. And then we think about the sort of through line of this, that as we consider the critical understanding of slavery as evidence of something that is not necessarily being completely abolished, but instead transformed, these are the, you know, process of mass incarceration and the criminal justice system, that all these things are inexorably linked. So when we’re talking about abolition even in the higher education context, it isn’t just about policing, right?

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Part of it is about this this larger apparatus of commitment to this notion of state control of surveillance, of domination, of boundary enforcement. And so abolition, I think it’s attempting to get at much of those different pieces that we are seeing very much grounded in what’s happening to communities, right? Because a lot of this conversation about police abolition, isn’t just about what happens on campus. It’s not just about faculty, staff and students, but in fact, in something that’s detailed really brilliantly in Davarian Baldwin’s new book is the relationship between post-secondary institutions and the communities within which they’re situated. And then how campus police have really provided a means to enforce again, these types of boundaries that I’m very sure that Jude and others will talk about. And so again, thinking about this from the defund out perspective, right, we’ve sort of seen in various levels of memefication, if you will, right.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
That the notion of defunding the police sounds radical until you realize that we’ve been defunding somebody other sort of social services and things that advanced the public good like education, right? Many of us have been you know, part and parcel of public college and universities, right? That are they’re intended to engage and to educate our broader public for the benefit of society as a whole. But yet we see that state appropriations continue to decline. We can certainly look at K-12 education that remains as if not more segregated than it was before. And so this notion of defunding is also grounded in this idea that our public institutions should serve a public good, right? They should be able to provide services that are sustaining, that are humanizing. And so that conversation has been going on for many, many decades, but it seems that when we turn our attention to this institution of policing, it sort of recenters this notion of what policing actually does, which is fundamentally to protect white people and white property.

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much for that background. Cause I do agree that I think that we need to understand the context and the use of the word and the language I think is one of the more valuable components there as well. I love talking public good versus private good and state funded versus state located like we’re moving to this look, you know, we used to be state funded, then we used to be state supported now we’re state located, but what does that exactly look like? Jude, can you talk a little bit about kind of, what’s currently going on with policing on college and university campuses and about a bit about that moment or that movement that Charles was talking about regarding on and away from campus and the town gown relationships that are occurring.

Jude Paul Dizon:
Sure. Yeah. Well, you know, first I’ll just say that there is almost a clear crisis of legitimacy when it comes to campus policing you know, we are in a moment in which there is a lot of attention right on, that’s what I’ve read here in this podcast questioning, well, why do we have campus police? What is their function? What is the nature of their work? What are the actual consequences of what they do and not just the reported benefits or reported rationale for why they are supposedly needed, right? This is all being directly confronted right now, which I think is really important for higher education to move forward in advancing racial justice. So stemming from that, I think what I’d like to say is you know, campus policing, when you look at the literature, when you just also listen to the discourse about campus safety and campus crime it’s pretty much restricted to this idea that campus police are needed because there is something called campus crime whether that’s real or imagined or perceived or feared.

Jude Paul Dizon:
And also that campus police historically, in terms of, you know, what scholars have written about are how are constantly, framed as being different than the city of police that campuses in the 1960s as result of student protests and demonstrations, felt motivated that they should have their own police force, that they could, that administrators could better direct and ensure that it was appropriate, whatever that might mean for the campus community as if they are supposed to be nicer, gentler than the city police coming out to campus at any moment’s notice, right? That’s like the narrative. And I think that as a result that I think that’s a narrative that has continued to be bought into and supported over the years as campus policing has only become more institutionalized and extended and expanded since the sixties. And I think consequently, there’s a few issues that I think students, staff, faculty, community members are being aware of now, which is that one campus police.

Jude Paul Dizon:
You put that word campus in front of them as if it is supposed to mean something different, but they are essentially the police. So as just like any other city police department, there’s many similarities. So I think one, what I’ll like to say is that I’m going to read some data from a national survey of campus law enforcement agencies. And this was a survey of 861 post-secondary institutions. So 69% of officers employed by a college campus are sworn officers, which means that they were trained at a police academy, just like city police officers are trained in the police academy 65% carry some kind of gun. 63% used pepper spray, 27% tazers. These are, these are weapons that are also used by city police officers. And so to the extent that campus police are, have been portrayed as something different than the city police, I think that is empirically you know, not as easy to say, and that there’s an, that essentially we can look at that these are in many ways identical, the city police, I think that’s being confronted now.

Jude Paul Dizon:
I also think that with campus policing what’s being confronted is the, what are the ways in which their duties and responsibilities have gradually increased over time? So rather than just attending to, again, what is quote unquote, the campus, you know, 86% have an arrest jurisdiction off campus and also parole jurors, patrol jurisdiction off campus as well. And I think you know, different news stories you know, if you, if you’re, don’t countless at the University of Chicago or other universities and looking at local dynamics you know, people have reported local residents have reported negative interactions with campus police officers. And there’s a question there as to why are private citizens unattached to the university being policed by university employees. And I think also what’s coming to light even more. So again recently has been one thing being called a 10-33 program, which has allowed department of defense, you know, military level equipment being dispersed and loan to police departments, which have included campus police departments as well.

Jude Paul Dizon:
And so you also see this growing awareness of the militarized nature of policing. So to the extent again, that this idea that they’re supposed to be friendly, gentle, with the students we see again, these other contradictory aspects of their actual practice. And I think just lastly, what I’d like to say is that you know, this focus on crime preventing mass violence, preventing a mass shootings, for example, all of which are of course, legitimate, you know, concerns. You know, I think for me, what I would like to say is that there’s been a huge neglect of the other consequences of having a police force on campus. And so you know, historically up until now, political activism is often targeted first by the, or the police are often the first response by administrators to political demonstrations on campus. So there’s an issue there of like free speech. And this idea that, that higher ed is supposed to be a place of ideas and, and academic freedom, but yet political expression is met with violence. And we also of course see, continue to see many accounts of racial profiling by campus police officers. And so while, you know, we are able to easily critique that in the larger public, we don’t see this on campus. And so, yeah, I just think there’s, there’s many issues that are coming to the light now with having campus law enforcement.

Heather Shea:
Jael, did you have a thought? I wanted to say something

Jael Kerandi:
I actually wanted to expand to Charles real quick cause he made a point. I think people often forget is it’s policing in all of its forms, right? We’re not just talking about law enforcement and I often see this to be most prevalent in K through 12, which is where I often think these conversations need to begin. It’s discussing suspensions, right? We’re talking about the rate of which our black and marches and are suspended in contrast to their peers. We’re talking about how they’re treated in K through five and what they’re told the actions that are made, who’s a quote unquote bad kid, or when they take certain actions, the severity of their consequence in like in comparison to their peer. And I think there’s just been this societal complacency with police treatment, right? We’ve almost agreed that like, this is the status quo. These are how things are.

Jael Kerandi:
And so we almost it seems like parts of our society have just said like, this is how it’s going to be forever and it doesn’t need to be. And I think so much, and more and more, what we’re seeing is people are saying, this is not what we’re going to tolerate. Right? Our taxpayer dollars are no longer going to be going into these institutions that are harming and murdering our people. And I remember when I wrote the letter to the University of Minnesota at the time black people were being killed at 13.2 times, the rate of their white peer in Minneapolis. And that is even when you talk about that number, that’s right. If any other part of our society was murdering people at that rate, it would not be a question of whether to remove that part of society. It wouldn’t it be a discussion on whether or not that mattered?

Jael Kerandi:
And I remember Angela, I said something I’ll always resonate, resonate with me of like our country promises life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And we’re stuck at life, right? We’re fighting for our humanity in a manner that just seems to be, so it almost seems sometimes absurd of the fact that we have to almost battle for our humanity. I have to prove to you that I deserve to live. I’m not proving anything else, but my mere existence. And so, you know, we talk a lot about bad apples, or we talked about this and policing in its inception was racist, right? The true end, the tree at its root is racist, right. There was supposed to be slave catchers. They were never supposed to protect us. They were never supposed to be our ally. They were never supposed to be there to ensure we were okay. So when people often talk about this communal aspect of law enforcement, what community are we talking about? Because they were never intended to actually protect black and brown people

Charles H.F. Davis III:
And I’ll just jump to add the, just really important connection. And I appreciate how you introduced the Trayvon Martin moment, which we know is like very much an awakening period for young folks that find themselves on campus today. And even for myself in many regards, but that the Trayvon Martin situation is actually an education problem, right? And this is the thing that the dream defenders helped teach us in that Trayvon was suspended from school because of the zero tolerance policy that placed him in Sanford at the time to begin with, right? So there are the climate and conditions that render people more vulnerable in our society that then made possible for George Zimmerman to profile and to kill him then to go and arrested by law enforcement who were again, supposed to supposedly be here to protect and serve and then go unconvicted by the state’s attorney’s office.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Right? So there’s really important connections that have to be considered as we think about this as educators, that there’s a symbiotic relationship here, right? And that education produces society, but society also produces education. And so what kind of education are we actually creating when we are really organizing this notion of schooling teaching and learning within the framework of carceral. Right. And I think that that has to be always at the center point of not creating as Jude’s articulated. So Brantly this differentiation between how we interpret college and universities and the broader society within which they function.

Jael Kerandi:
Absolutely.

Heather Shea:
That’s great. That’s great. Thank you. Erin, I’m curious, I think Jael just mentioned something about kind of doing nothing, keeping the status quo, you know, what are the cons of, of doing nothing? I think they’re, they’re apparent, but I think it’s good to eliminate those. You know, there’s a lot of complacent people out there that are just like, this is too hard. We don’t want you to talk about it anymore. And then on the other side, if, making change is important, what are some of the cons potentially, what are we giving up or losing? And then with regard to your work specifically I’m really curious about how all of this intersects with students who are pursuing their education within a prison.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
Sure. So, you know, I think before I kind of delve into that, I think it’s important to add a little bit of nuance to the conversation in terms of how we think about a particular institution student body, especially as there are increasingly more institutions that are starting to offer higher ed in prison programs, institutions need to understand that those incarcerated students are now part of your student body. And so the policies, the practices, the procedures that you have in particular, as they relate to law enforcement will have an impact on those incarcerated students. They may not be on campus, but they see what’s happening. They read literally everything. And so it will certainly have that, that kind of effect where incarcerated students are, you know, thinking, okay, this is the institution that I’m affiliated with for these programs, but this institution is also tied, right, as Charles was saying, symbiotically to this larger structure of law enforcement surveillance and supervision.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
And so I think the first step, you know, at least as my work is concerned is to make sure that we are pretty comprehensive in understanding who our student population is and how student affairs as a field can also reach out to those students and say, Hey, let’s talk about what a student group looks like inside of a prison. Let’s talk about what student leadership looks like inside of a prison, right? If, if there were programs that were happening at the University of Minnesota, was Jael able to go into facilities and talk about her student leadership role and build leadership capacity with those students who were incarcerated. I think that largely student affairs has ignored these students because they haven’t been seen as real students. They’ve been seen as kind of like these one-off charity cases where there’s not a ton of institutional resources put behind a truly comprehensive and inclusive educational experience.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
But what we know and what the research tells us is that all of these different pieces, the leadership opportunities, the activism opportunities, obviously the academic opportunities are all part of the process that we, as researchers, as practitioners stand behind from a theoretical standpoint and from a practitioner standpoint. And so I want to kind of put that out there as the umbrella, because the impact of us not doing anything of not changing that definition of how we look at our student population and maintaining the same kinds of policies, because it’s easier to do that. You know, it’s just, it’s ludicrous in it’s even suggestion because we are not at a place where things are working well, we have not, we are not at a place where things are functioning at the, at their optimal capacity. And so if we continue to do nothing, you know, as my grandfather, my late grandfather used to say garbage in garbage out.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
If we continue to do bad policy and enact bad policy and procedures, we will continue to have the same tragic situations and circumstances that litter our newsfeeds, our timelines, our television day in and day out with no respite for any of us. In addition, if we are only going to make reactive changes, we are only addressing symptoms of the root cause of the issue. It is as if you know, someone has a cold and you are just going to give them Kleenex for their runny notes, not going to do anything to address maybe, you know, a virus or anything else that is causing this runny nose. You’re just like, here’s some Kleenex. It’s also only half ply. So it’s not going to work that well, good luck may the odds be ever in your favor? And so, you know, we have to understand that these reactionary solutions are incomplete and they’re beneath us.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
If we’re going to be honest about this conversation, those of us that are in higher ed, whether we are professors, instructors, researchers, student leaders, some combination of all of the above reactionary solutions are beneath us. And we need to do better as individuals we need to do better collectively. And we need to be our colleagues to do better. We have to have those tough conversations with the colleagues who aren’t doing anything, right, because that’s the other part of this conversation. There are those of us on the call and, and our networks who are engaged age, who are active, who are building that power and leadership in communities. And then there are other folks who are doing nothing, right, because they’ve benefited from playing the game of capitalism and the game of diplomacy and the game of acculturation, and they have much more lose. They feel then, then perhaps they feel we have to lose when we all have very substantial risks that we take when we step out on these limbs and say the things that we say.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
And so I think there’s this larger call for higher ed as an institution, as a total institution, if we’re going to use Goffman terms, right? There’s this larger institution of higher ed needs to be pushed in a whole different direction because we also need to problematize this dichotomy. I think that higher institutions and law enforcement are separate. And that they’re on these opposing ends of the life spectrum. Again, if we look theoretically at Goffman’s work and we look at how total institutions work, higher ed institutions, and are far more alike than anyone wants to mention. Higher ed institutions have very specific ways that they expect students to show up in class. They have ways that they expect students to present themselves. They have ways that they expect students to speak up, speak out, push back. Prisons, have the same thing. They have rules that residents need to abide by.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
They have rules by which residents can and cannot make contributions or make suggestions, et cetera. These are the same. And so if we are not problematizing the symmetry between these two practices, then we really have not begun to address the deeper, deeper issues that lead to a lot of the situations that bring on the need for this kind of conversation. Am I okay with time. I get really razzle-dazzle with myself. And so, you know, I think that one of the things that we also need to consider as we broaden our scope of how we talk about our institution’s student population and how we recognize the symmetry between higher ed institutions and the carceral state, we need to start remembering that our incarcerated students are also citizens, despite the fact that they are not treated that way. They are in fact citizens, and they are able to participate in their own kinds of ways in their, in the leadership, in their communities, leadership within their facilities, leadership on their block.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
And if we’re not able to recognize those contributions that incarcerated students make to the communities, as they define them, then we are also missing that opportunity to bring them into the work that is even representative on the broader campus. And so, yes, incarcerated students can write to legislators about legislation that’s up for public hearing that campus students are also writing testimony for. Yes, we can have politicians visit students inside the same way we have politicians come on to campus and give keynotes. These things have to happen with our incarcerated students as well. Otherwise we’re not doing right by them in these educational opportunities. And so I’ll stop there because there’s just so much to talk about.

Heather Shea:
A lot to talk about related to student leadership and activism. And I think it’s, it’s great that you bring that kind of component to it because I think that the direction I want to go now next is with Jael and thinking a little bit about student activism and what students are demanding and how often the needs on college and university campuses are expressed by students. Can you talk a little bit about in your role as student body president at University of Minnesota, what were some of the shifts that occurred? And like, as you engaged your students on your campus and representing them, how did you go about doing that and making sure that voices were heard? Cause clearly Erin saying obviously we, everyone should everyone’s voice should be heard here.

Jael Kerandi:
No, absolutely. I would love to. And first, like thank you so much for bringing up, but I don’t think that’s discussed enough. I actually don’t think the point is honestly ever brought up. Especially in Minneapolis. I don’t, I wouldn’t say that that’s been heard or discussed about what that looks like or if the university truly acknowledges those students. And so thank you so much for bringing that. And again, I want to mention, like, these discussions are not new, right? When you look back to 1923, like Florida A&M when they were protesting, they did a three month protest and we’re talking boycotting everything. And you can think about just like what they had to do, or even like the Children’s March, right. We’re talking about young children 1963 coming out of school, doing these different things or South Carolina State University. I remember they had a protest and they actually ended up having, I can’t remember the year, but they had police presence come on.

Jael Kerandi:
And they actually sprayed fire and killed students. And it later became known as the Orangeburg massacre. So we’re, we’re thinking about all these activists that have been on campus or these organizing that has been present in, you can only do what, like honor that, right? Like we’ve come from so far and we stand on the back of so much, but when we’re looking at campuses today and as student body president when the murder of George Floyd happened, thank you. In 1968. Yes. When murder of George flood happened on our campus, I was, I had actually became student body president that January and I was the first black student to be student body undergraduate student body president. And I couldn’t sit there in that role and say, well, I’m here now. This is a positional place. And it was just like, oh, okay, well, this is, we’re just going to wait to hear from the university.

Jael Kerandi:
And I remember when I eventually watched the video, I was like, we don’t need the Minneapolis police department on our campus any longer. There’s just no reason you can prove to me, or there’s no justification that you can give to say that their values align with our university values. And so either our universities to take our values off of our website and we need to stop saying, we care about diversity equity inclusion, or we need to remove Minneapolis police department from our campus. Those two cannot exist in tandem. And it was just so frustrating because to me it was, these are tuition paying students. I don’t care if they’re 6.9% black students, each one of those students is still paying tuition. We know that state dollar funding has gone down. We know that our, our universities are not operating with high revenue. It’s your students and it’s your taxpayer dollars from the state.

Jael Kerandi:
So if you’re telling me that your revenue streams don’t matter to you as they do, then you need to be worried about what the students are telling you. And what students were saying is the very people that you’re quote unquote saying are protecting us. We actually need protection from right. We’re saying that we want to see them here. And I wrote the letter and asked them to sever ties with the Minneapolis police department 24 hours, because I didn’t think there needed to get another discussion. I didn’t think I needed to go again, make the case that I’d consistently been making years prior. I didn’t think that students need to consistently have to be in such vulnerable positions and explain their stories over and over and over again. So you could capitalize off of them, but then not actually serve them. And so it was a matter of saying that safety is not this objective measure.

Jael Kerandi:
I don’t see a fence and say, now I’m safe. I’m safe from because I trust that whatever’s on the other side of that fence, I’ll be protected from same thing with policing. It’s not a matter of objective seeing a police officer and saying, I feel safe with your presence. It’s saying that we trusted them. And students are saying, we do not trust our police officers on our campus at all. And understanding that at some point the university had to understand they don’t get to be excluded, right? Issues of race. It almost seems like when it was beneficial, we’ll talk about it. Right? Black history month. Absolutely. Let’s have all the discussions in the world. What speaker can we bring in? What, what can we do? Where can we hang up our flag and show that this is what we cared about. But when it came down to, can we Institute a class on anti-racism it was whoa, whoa, whoa.

Jael Kerandi:
I don’t know if our students would really take to that. Right. When we talked about, what do you want to do about your tenure policies? Like whoa, whoa, whoa, we’ve had this for so many years, right? When we talked about what are your hiring policies? What are you doing in regards to your staff versus your tenured faculty? It was whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, this is kind of, they don’t have a master’s and we get into bureaucracy, we get into politics, and we go around, around in circles and we actually don’t serve the students. And so it was a matter of saying that, you know, our police are on our campus. They’re actually not preventing crime. A lot of the times I hear like, well, we need police. Police are reactionary. They come after something has happened. They come to respond to something, but they aren’t stopping things from happening.

Jael Kerandi:
When you look at the crimes on campus, quote, unquote, that have happened, they’re actually not happening on campus. They’re happening around campus, but they’re not happening on our actual campuses and specifically to Minneapolis. And so it was as student body president, I couldn’t sit there and let this happen. Knowing what our students are going to bring the access I had to our administration, because the it for no longer could we just sit there and allow this to happen. Murder to everyone should be a nonpartisan issue. It should not be a left or right issue. It should not be well, this is where murder is. Non-Partisan and George Floyd was murdered. I, it, sometimes I’m almost baffled at the fact that we were discussing that. So it’s, it’s getting our administrations to understand that if you’re actually in education, if you’re in a place where you’re supposed to be doing something, that’s transformative.

Jael Kerandi:
If you’re in a place where you’re actually in it to change lives, that you’re actually in it to shift society. Then you, as everybody else should understand that our police presence on campus is not what is supporting our students, our police present on campus, not what goes to ensure that our students understand that. And that includes our white students as well. You don’t get to just talk to the black students and be like, this is what’s going on in our black and brown students. You need to let the, our white students understand these systems of privilege and oppression that exists because they shouldn’t be learning about them later. And like I said, I think it should start in K through 12, but if you’re in a position as a university and institution of learning, that should be your role is to educate. It’s to be pragmatic. It’s to give different perspectives and not be just willing to go along with the status quo.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Yeah. I want to pick on the, the word safety here for just a moment, because I think that, that in particular, you mentioned it multiple times and I’m sure the conversations with your student government and with your student body kind of came around to that for whom and what does that mean? How does that align with both sense of belonging and, and feeling safe as an individual? And also the kind of fullness of humanity that each of us, I have a right to live. You know, whether you’re a student or whether anywhere. So can you talk a little bit about when you say safety, what were some of the conversations that happened around that word in particular?

Jael Kerandi:
No, that’s, that’s a great question. And I think obviously there was pushback in my ask to remove the police from our campus because people were saying, well, now I don’t feel safe. Right? And I would often encourage students your lived experience or what you’ve gone through is valid to you. I would also encourage you to take a moment and empathize with your students on campus, who are telling you for years. And for so long when they see a police officer, it’s not safety, right? We start teaching police etiquette to our young boys and girls when they’re three years old, like, I want you to start to think about the very different life that you are not living. Right. When we talk about safety, it means that when I walk, whatever measure is in place almost is going to be a barrier or it’d be my defense in front of me.

Jael Kerandi:
We don’t get that from the police. We get that from each other, right. Who, whoever has had our back us when people are talking about what I’m walking home, I’m, we’re, we’re not saying, well, if something happens, I’m going to call the police. I’m going to be on the phone with my friend to make sure I’m okay. Right. When we’re talking about why, you know, my brother’s pushed me on the inside when we’re walking, it’s to make sure they’re my line of defense. When we’re talking about call me when you get home or call me when you’re on your way home, that’s a line of defense. And that’s what I’m talking about with safety. We’re not getting that from the police. We’re not getting that from law enforcement. We’re not getting that from the state. We’re getting it from each other. It’s a very communal thing.

Jael Kerandi:
So when we were talking about the conversation in student government, I think people were scared because it’s different. I’m asking you to do something you might have not seen before. I’m asking you to think outside of the sphere that’s been offered to you. I’m asking you to look outside our Western politics and our society, and start to think about what does it actually look like to have community safety? No, it doesn’t mean it’s not a risk. I’m not saying it will be perfect, but what we have right now is not what we can continue to have. The murder of black and brown people is just simply unacceptable. It’s disgusting. And it’s reached a point and has been at that point for so long and which we cannot tolerate it anymore. And so I think it was a matter of telling our students that I understand your perspective and you will, you don’t lose my respect necessarily, but I need you to understand that this also cannot stand, right. We don’t have to actually agree on it. I’m not looking for consensus in regards to my life, right. Or the threat of the lives of my loved ones. This is a matter that has to actually be addressed.

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
And I would just add, you know, there’s this often false equivalency. So when we talk about, you know, all students feeling safe, it’s sort of all lives matters. That discourse that really doesn’t recognize how we are differently, vulnerable to state and state sanctioned violence. Right? And we see that that often drives a lot of the conversation as it’s been evident in certain you know, reportings about how universities are trying to handle or deal or grapple, right? With this question of safety. And they’re saying, well, if we remove, you know, police in certain folks won’t feel safe. We keep them, they won’t feel safe. So like, we don’t know what to do. And it’s partly because we aren’t recognizing that level of marginalization or minoritization that happens in these settings as a process, right. We attribute those to individual people’s as labels or as identity categories, as opposed to understanding how we at an institutional level are deeply involved in creating the climate conditions for policing to be an accepted norm or a way of operating.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
I think I want to tug a bit more on this differentiation that I’m hearing Jael speak about too, is that, you know, many institutions are responding to the extent that, well, we haven’t killed anybody. So therefore, like we don’t have a problem here. And one of the things that we know from some preliminary data that’s coming out from the healthy mind survey, which is fairly common now within a number of university campuses, but it has been recently administered here is that psychological and emotional safety and wellbeing are amongst the top of the list. And the biggest concerns for many students who are saying, I don’t feel safe with the presence of policing. Even so much as you know, we have armed police, that’ll show up to a cultural center for any number of reasons, but if I’m a black student in a cultural center and a police officer with a gun shows up, I’m going to be immediately concerned, right.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Or I’m at least going to have to live with the psychological trauma of considering what might happen if I don’t do whatever is considered to be the right thing. Right. And I think that that’s like critically important for us to understand that it’s not simply the metrics should be whether life or death, you know, it’s happening. Like safety has to be a precondition, right? It can’t be something that’s after the fact or reactionary as Jael, as you mentioned with the policing as a whole. So I think we have to consider, you know, the ways that we interpret understand safety, basically, you know, to the extent that safety has not been determined for many of us as marginalized people based on what the state can or can not do. And in fact, the state has been the primary arbiter of injustice against us. So why would we feel safe with the presence of, you know, more or less an apparatus that extends that level of power and renders us more vulnerable?

Heather Shea:
Yeah.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
I would also like to chime in, you know, I think in this conversation, in any conversation about abolition and there’s the sort of necessary question of, okay, well, if we’re not going to have cops in communities and on campus, what do we do? And I think part of the first step, which, you know, Mariame Kaba talks about all the time is we have to divorce ourselves. Exactly. We have to divorce ourselves from this societal ideology that equates vengeance and accountability that equates punishment and accountability. Until we do that, we will not ever be able to come up with a system that is rooted in community accountability and restorative practices and restorative justice, which is ultimately, I think, where we need to be going if we are talking about abolition, but we cannot make that movement until that separation has happened. Until people are educated to understand that this level of punishment, this level of literal vengeance, this is literal eye for, and eye, and sometimes your whole life for an eye, right, because there’s, we, we won’t talk about sentencing.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
That’s an whole other conversation. But until we are able to see that, that it is this ideological, false equivalency that drives so much of the fear-mongering that we have as opposition, until we understand that, we are going to still be in this place where activists, practitioners, scholars, students are pushing are pushing, are pushing, and we’re using data to support our claims. You know, we can look at, we can look at clear data all day, and we can talk about how those data, you know, indicate X, Y, and Z. But when you have this fear based equivalency, that is the root of an entire system that is like largely autonomous and lacks accountability. Then you start to see where we’ve got to start picking away at that poisonous foundation.

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much. Let’s shift gears just a moment, cause I do want to bring back the, the point about the audience for this podcast, right? So student affairs educators those who work with student leaders, student activists and their administrators, right. Who are listening today? Jude, could you talk a little bit about some advice you might have for folks who are working with student activists and the conversations that they might be having, where they can leverage their positions to support students like Jael, who, who is taking kind of bold steps for change?

Jude Paul Dizon:
Sure. I think I’d also like to just respond to like some of the great thoughts that were just shared. I think, you know, for me, in the terms of the question about, you know, what, what does safety look like? You know, I think also higher education leaders need to begin bridging whatever plans or symposia plans. If you have for racial equity, diversity, et cetera on campus with, with also then what, what is campus public safety? And I’ve heard, you know, for many people you know, people are at a loss sometimes on college campuses with what to do when they experience a hate crime or when they experienced bias. And so to the extent that that has real consequences for marginalized groups, safety, when we acknowledge that there is a lack of resources for them to go to, but you have the police, you know, there’s a mismatch there where resources are direct and also what the university thinks does like a safety issue or a safety of priority, if that makes sense.

Jude Paul Dizon:
And you know, I think it’s important. Think about too, when students of color, if you let the cultural center as a Haven for them, not the police department, I’ve never heard anyone say that police departments where you go to feel safe or at home on campus. And then acknowledging that all campuses have a cultural center. Sometimes a cultural center is a room. Sometimes the cultural center is a person in an office suite, somewhere else in a general building on campus. You know, there’s a, there’s a mismatch of resources there I would argue. And so not to the question you posting, you know, about student affairs educators, you know, how can folks in student affairs be supportive of student activists right now calling for abolition? I think one, it starts with looking at yourself and being starting that soft hard self-examination of like, what are your own biases or your own thoughts or your own beliefs around policing and campus safety.

Jude Paul Dizon:
And what does that mean for you and for your role? So I think starting with that, self-examination of just, what are your core beliefs about, you know, this issue. And then two, I think, how does that then translate into, what do you believe about your role and questioning what you are required to do in your role? I think for me, a couple of things come to mind is like, you know, in residential life, what are the policies and procedures that require the immediate unquestioned user use of campus police and those that actually make sense for the situation at hand. You know, in terms of my own research, I’ve spoken to students who are resident advisors, and oftentimes they feel that their own approach as undergraduates trained by professional staff, you know, that, you know, they’re required in a situation to call the campus police officer and they report observing just a very different unhelpful and developmental, not, not holistic student approach, right from the campus police officer, the professional in charge of that, who now becomes in charge of the situation with what, you know, this RA would have done with what they were trying to do before the situation got too big to handle and what they’re trained to do by another set of professionals on campus.

Jude Paul Dizon:
Right. And they have shared with me that they feel unsupported when the campus police officers come to support a student in. So I think one, you know, how can, so in this case, you know, how could residence life professionals start re-evaluating and reconsidering the ways in which campus law enforcement has to be employed? You know, I think also something to think about is the fact that campus police officers are, are not only enforcing, you know, you know, public laws, but they’re also enforcing the student code of conduct. So in many ways they’re enforcing a dual set of rules upon students, depending on the situation and also how they approach the situation. And so I think that’s something for institution overall to, to reconsider and to think about, you know, the, the ways in which campus police officers sanctioned students again, in this, in this dual set of rules and conduct codes.

Jude Paul Dizon:
Yeah, I think, you know, for me, I think I’d like to just say that in the debates that have been happening this year, you know, the focus is of course on the police officers, themselves and campus chiefs of police. But I think what, who needs to be more held accountable, who needs to be part more of the conversation and also identified and taken to task. So to speak or else the administrators who ultimately have used police officers and chiefs of police are responsible for, and the administrators who set the context of which these departments get to exist, right. And what they enforce and what they don’t enforce. And so I think in terms of just addressing climate for all students, staff, faculty, the local communities, you know, administrators, the president, the vice president, provost, et cetera, they need to, these roles need to start being you know, I think front and center of these debates and not just, you know, to me, what I often see is students vs. Police chief. Right. and so these other administrators are also important roles for all actually altering what needs to be altered structurally and systematically with, you know, policing issues on college campuses.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. I’m going to be talking about college campuses. Sometimes we lump every CA kind of campus into one box. Right. But we know there’s major differences based on two-year institutions, four-year institutions, public, private, technical schools. Charles, can you talk a little bit about what role campus safety and policing might look like or how it might differ from campus to campus and then Erin, I’d love to hear more about how this also translates to incarcerated students.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there’s a lot to be said for things that are distinguishable between the institution types, but also things that are very similar and familiar. Right. And so I think one of the things to consider with some of our two-year institutions, I think it will depend one the extent to which they are part of a large system. Right. We can think about the California Community Colleges is something that’s relatively big and significant by comparison to some other smaller or more isolated two-year institutions. And so resources are very different, right. But when I think about, you know, our work in LA and then my time at USC with Jude something that was always apparent was how our two-year systems often had contracted in similar ways as was the case at the University, Minnesota for supplemental services, but actually for their core component of law enforcement to be allocated out to say the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department, which is the case at LA trade tech.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Right? And so you have even less of a clear distinguishing factor of both, you know, where campus starts and where it ends. And we see this permeability happening as, you know, as institutions continue to grow and develop, but we see it, especially in our two-year sort of computer-based systems. And I think one of the misunderstandings, right, is that even our four-year institutions still composed primarily of our quote unquote traditionally aged college students, 18 to 24, who are living on campus. And we know it to be true that the changing ecology of post-secondary education has required much, much more commuter students to be a part of that process that are regularly traversing, those boundaries. And in this sort of COVID-19 space, that many folks never even set foot on campus, right. In any regular capacity as even as a new faculty member, I’ve probably been to campus here only three times.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
And that’s, you know, working here full time and being on a fellowship next year, I won’t even be near and around campus. I’ll have two-years of not even being here. And there are many students, right. In a similar way when we’re thinking about Erin’s work and others who are learning and engaging remotely. Right. But are still very much vulnerable and susceptible to various forms of concept codes of conduct that lead to police involvement, even in a stay at home, learn from home situation. Right. and so I think we have to consider, again, what are the relationships and networks that are allowing for just sort of like a carceral society to exist? Right. I think in addition, we know that there are somewhat, as we consider articulation agreements between two-years and four-years with regard to how students can, you know, sort of effectively the transfer into the four-year system.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
There are similar articulation agreements in relationships between municipal and college university police. Right. and if you think of it as I’ve been diagram, in some extent you might think of the sections where they have separate jurisdictions, but closer and closer as we look, those jurisdictions are becoming more blurred and more overlap. Whereas we’ve seen in the case most recently in Minnesota, right? That the University of Minnesota police department was actually deployed to Brooklyn center in the wake of yet another shooting in Minneapolis, in full SWAT gear to go to Jude’s point about the 10-33 program. So as we’re looking across these institution types, it’s always thinking about how is the state involved? What is the relationship there? How has law enforcement becomes? So ubiquitous, even in the, how we do learning, how we do teaching, how we do education. That there really aren’t as many differences with regards to the fundamental operations and what they, what they actually do.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
I think a lot too about, you know, these two-year institutions being access points for most of the marginalized populations that we talk about in higher ed. So they’re already coming into a space as members of vulnerable communities already have an existing relationship or history with policing because of how we treat those communities. And if we think about Carla Shedd’s work in the context of K-12 and extended into higher education, we can acknowledge a carceral continuum that for many black and brown students in particular, those who are low-income and otherwise vulnerable may have experiences in educational settings with police from as early as preschool all the way through college. I remember hearing a very distinctive story in my early months here from a colleague with regard to a student who had been adjusting to justice involved youth before they came to college was I think on a probationary status with the state and as a virtue of a desk attendant who asked them for their ID, their student ID and them not having it called the police, the police then come and end up arresting the student who then gets dinged as a result of their conditions for their probation of having been involved with police and then is forced back into incarceration, all because of them not having an ID to play basketball at a rec center, which we know you can verify students, you know, in terms of who they are in many other ways, right.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
Without involving the police. So again like the mechanisms and the functioning of policing as an apparatus of the state that sort of incubated and sustained and legitimized by college and universities is something that spans the boundaries of how we think about these clear demarcations. Because again, there’s an erosion between what is considered campus, what is considered a community. And police are really left to determine in some regards, both the spatial, but also the symbolic boundaries between who we consider insiders and who we consider outsiders. And I think that is probably ever more difficult and challenging, not just to the institutions, but those that have other sort of open access type framings. Right? If you don’t have like formalized gates, like, so you do at USC, but your campus is just in the city, right? You have patrols that sort of work in that particular way.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
And it’s the same way in many of our two-years that are in fact, open access, open enrollment are often located in spaces that are easily accessible to the broader public as they should be. Right. But then this determination of who we believe deserves to be here, right. And if we believe that you’re in the role that you’re supposed to be in, there have been many a times when I was at USC where I’ve been, you know, questioned not only to about whether I was a student, but whether I belonged on campus at all, for any number of reasons, the majority of which are certainly racialized in particular ways, right? So we have to be in question about this boundary, making this boundary enforcement, who we consider to be a member of a college, university community, and what that looks like. And in ways it looks very, very different. And really, again, just mirrors the broader public that has already created its own demarcations of social identity and other forms of power that are operating.

Heather Shea:
So Erin, we’re talking about different types of institutions, but definitely different types of students. Also, can you kind of extend this into the populations that you’re serving.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
Sure, you know, one of the pieces that we rarely talk about in, in terms of education as provided inside is that there are many DOCs departments of corrections. So these sort of state agencies that in fact contract with community colleges to do adult basic ed and GED work, right? So again, this is the symbiotic relationship of higher education and the carceral state is in many instances, contractually realized through this where community colleges, again, that are open access, open enrollment institutions are providing educational opportunities on the K-12 level inside of prisons already. And even with that relationship, there is not, there is just an egregiously insufficient amount of attention paid to the student affairs piece of an incarcerated student’s educational experience. There’s so much that they do not have access to. And that’s, you know, that’s outside of old, there’s no technology or, oh, there’s no this, or, oh, there’s no that. A lot of times people will use those as the excuses, because again, it’s too hard, right.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
But, but what we have to do is say, yes, it is hard and yes, it still needs to be done. Especially as Pell has been, you know, re-instated at least legislatively and the Consolidated Appropriations Act and has a deadline of implementation of July 1st, 2023 advocates are pushing for earlier implementation. There’s going to be an influx of federal money into these institutions, mostly to two-year institutions, but some four-year publics and many more privates than I think four-year publics. And so there will be this opportunity for budget to no longer be the excuse, right? So schools will often talk about how they don’t have money for, you know, like Jael was mentioning. They don’t have money for someone to teach an anti-racism class. They don’t have money to extend their searches for administrators to pockets of the population that are majority black and brown.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
They don’t have money for this. They don’t have money for that. Except they have money to build new athletic fields and name, fancy buildings after slave owners. They have money for that, but they don’t have money and student affairs programs even for their students on campus. And so we were going to have to push those institutions to say, if you are accessing these Pell dollars on behalf of these incarcerated students, you need to be providing the same level of student affairs services to those incarcerated students, as you are to your free world students. So you need to start talking to the DOCs about office hours and how you can do that. You need to start talking to the DOC about how you can provide academic advising career advising for those who are getting out or even career advising for those who want a better job in the facility, you need to talk about how you’re going to provide X, Y, and Z student groups, leadership, publishing opportunities, all of these different pieces that we take for granted on free world campuses.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
Schools are going to have to figure out how to provide those services to incarcerated students, to do that in partnership with DOCs, and to do it in a way that sensibly, authentically, sincerely, Embeds the students’ voice into the creation of the programs, because the, there are so many pieces that we rarely talk about, but one of the others is that for the most part, if you are in an adult, if you’re teaching in an adult facility, these are folks who your students are generally in their thirties, thirties, forties, maybe fifties, maybe sixties. These are people who have been out of the traditional classroom sometimes for decades. And so while they may lack sort of recent exposure to traditional higher educational opportunities, what they do not lack is a lived experience that tells them the environments in which they learn best and what tools they need to learn better to learn faster, to learn more strategically.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
And so schools just really have to do better. And ed department needs to monitor that the ed department needs to hold those institutions accountable, who are accessing Pell dollars for incarcerated students, so that we aren’t having these predatory institutions that just take students money and don’t give them any educational opportunity that is worthwhile. And so, while it’s not so much about campus policing with incarcerated students, because they are already under this very explicit system of surveillance and supervision. It is about how we build out a broader, more comprehensive notion of student affairs with our student population and make sure that we build incarcerated students into the plans that we create for them at an institutional level.

Heather Shea:
Yeah, you know, I think I would love to explore this further on another episode, because I think that there’s some complexities around serving students in who are incarcerated in, in ways that I don’t think our population of student affairs educators have ever thought about. And also post-incarceration right. So like, what does it look like when they arrive on campus and how do we better make sure every student feels they have a sense of belonging within our, with our institutions, whether they’re online, you know, and whatever age they are too. Right. Like, I think that was another really important point you make. So let’s, let’s put a pin on that topic because Erin, I want to have you back to talk more about that specifically and hear about campuses that are doing this well, too. And of course we always have so little time but thank you all for your energy and your enthusiasm. And I want to end, as we always do on student affairs now, by asking the question as, as the result of the conversation or as a result of things that you’re thinking about in your work outside of this conversation, what are you pondering, hoping for troubling now. And so Jude, we’ll start with you today.

Jude Paul Dizon:
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, Erin, I just want to say I’ve been really inspired by your ideas that you’ve shared your thoughts then. So I think what I’ll say is that what’s what I’m pondering is how can student affairs educators, you know, who are very, you know, spirited and excited about their work? How can they actually do that work with students at the center and not the institution? Cause I think oftentimes we are upholding the institution as we are transacting with students. So how can they serve students and not the institution.

Heather Shea:
Thank you. Thank you.

Jael Kerandi:
Yeah, I’m also, I have to think too, on from Erin, I’m thinking honestly about what higher education can do to reduce recidivism instead of what sometimes our society almost does to support it, right? Like what, what can higher education do to ensure that we’re actually supporting these students in that integration into society and making sure that they feel like they are part of institution, so they are coming back into something. And I think that’s honestly so far, I’m so happy. Like I just heard all of this because I hadn’t before. And then the other thing is just our faculty, staff, student affairs, anyone in institution, understanding that the humanity of your students has to come before their instruction, right? You can’t just put them into seats and tell them what you need to do, right. I’m your student for four-years, but I will be a black woman all my life. So understanding that it goes beyond the four walls of their institution and that humanity has to come first.

Heather Shea:
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Corbett.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
Yeah, this has been a great conversation. I’m just y’all are dope. So my, my final thought one is just thinking about what Jael mentioned. So much of the research that’s out about the benefits of providing education inside has focused on the recidivism paradigm, which in and of itself is very problematic because what it does is it centers the efficacy of the educational program on whether or not the carceral state decides it wants to, as we heard in Charles’s story, as there’s a, you know, I had one of my students who was picked up on an alleged technical violation. There are forces outside of the control of higher ed that are actually more influential in determining whether or not someone recidivate and also states defined recidivism differently. And so we’re not even having a conversation about the same term. And so I want to thank you just for reminding me of that, because I usually say it and I’m real venomous about it, and I completely forgot about forgotten about it.

Dr. Erin Corbett:
So thank you. The second piece that I’m just always kind of taking with me, you know, comes from the, the adage of the tying up of all of our liberation together, you know, so much of what I do so much of what practitioners in higher ed in prison do is about liberation, right? It’s it may be about physical liberation, you know, how are we making sure that our students are able to get out of physical custody, but so much more as about kind of mental, spiritual, transformative liberation and how we are able to serve as you know, resources to students who are undergoing this kind of larger transformative process. And so I would like for folks to kind of walk away from this conversation, at least as it relates to higher ed in prison, that if you are not, and this one of my students wrote this, if you are not walking into those doors with his liberation in mind, then just turn around and go back to your car and go home. And liberation means we are providing comprehensive educational opportunities. We are looking at advocacy, we are looking at ad activism. We are looking at organizing. We are looking at all of these different ways for people to be free. And if that is not at the center of your instructional methodology and of your just overall ideological practices, then this work is not for you. And maybe you can do something else.

Heather Shea:
Wow. That’s really powerful. Thank you so much, Dr. Davis, your final thoughts.

Charles H.F. Davis III:
I mean, I have so many, I would just echo my colleagues that this has been a brilliant and generative conversation. And you know, for me, the thing that’s top of my mind coming in is the same thing going out and that’s abolition. You know, in the spirit of all the baker, I woke up this morning with my mind on freedom because I believe in freedom, I cannot rest until it comes. And so I’m just very thankful. And I think deeply, deeply grateful really for those who have come forward to, to engage in this conversation with us, that helps me continue to understand that none of us work can or should be done alone, that we can only get free together. And I think that, you know, we really have an opportunity now more so than ever to push the cause of abolition, freedom, liberation, and transformation in a way that we’ve never been able to. So once again, thank you Heather, for the opportunity for us to bring it to this particular forum, to all my colleagues who continue to do so much tremendous and courageous work. And I hope that we can just continue to push the conversation forward and get some things actually done, because I think we’re on the cusp. You know, we just have to continue to push an not let up.

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much. This conversation far exceeded my expectations and being enthusiastic. I am, I’m leaving this today with just so much gratitude for each of you and what you shared and what you brought to our listeners. So thank you for your time and your emotional labor. And for all of the words of wisdom that you shared on Student Affairs Now also thank you to our sponsors, Stylus publishing and Anthology. We so appreciate your support. Also want to give a huge shout out to Natalie Ambrosey the production assistant for our podcast, who does all of the behind the scenes to make us look good and sound good. And if you are listening today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website, scroll to the bottom of the homepage and add your email to our MailChimp list. While you’re there, you can check out our growing archives. And as you listen today, if you found this content to be useful, we’d love it. If you’d share this episode with your networks again, I’m Heather Shea. Thanks again to all of you who joined us, joined me today and everybody who’s listening and watching make it a great week, everyone.

Websites: 

Scholars for Black Lives

Defund Police

Cops Off Campus Coalition

Online Courses:

Defund the Police

Books: 

Mariame Kaba – “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us”

Alex Vitale – “End of Policing”

Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners – “The Feminist and the Sex Offender”

Davarian Baldwin – ”In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower”

Reports: 

Campus Policing: A Guide for Higher Education Leaders

Articles:

More Colleges Should Divest from the Institution of Policing

If Black Lives Matter to Colleges, They’ll Divest from Campus Police
Why We Should Abolish Campus Police