BY THE CAMPUS POLICE WORKING GROUP

The following is an excerpt, with source citations removed, from the recently released report On Campus Police Forces; see also the excerpt “The Growth and Development of Campus Police.” In July 2020, the AAUP appointed a Campus Police Working Group and charged its members with drafting a report on the role of police on campus, the appropriateness of higher education institutions’ having their own police forces, the impact of systemic racism on campus policing, and changes needed to ensure that campuses are safe and welcoming for diverse peoples, especially those who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. 

The relatively recent expansion of campus police forces is inextricably linked to issues of systemic racism and poses several ethical and political concerns that, on their own, merit serious scrutiny from the academic profession. However, we wish to draw special attention to how the rise and function of campus police forces exists in clear tension with the AAUP’s core value of ensuring that higher education serves the common good. Academic freedom and shared governance are essential to upholding that core value, but campus police are often at odds with academic freedom and shared governance.  

As explicated in both the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the AAUP understands academic freedom as the ability for researchers and instructors to explore and disseminate knowledge without interference by administrations, governing boards, or political powers. This freedom is especially important when the pursuit of knowledge leads a professor to conclusions or ideas that chafe against the political convictions of those in positions of power or threaten their authority. Crucially, this freedom to explore and disseminate knowledge extends to a professor’s ability to share it in public fora, including when engaged in political action. As the 1940 Statement notes, “College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.” Faculty members often exercise their academic freedom by joining students or staff engaged in confrontational direct actions aimed at compelling those in power to change some feature of campus policy. Campus police forces often stand in direct opposition to this freedom to explore, disseminate, and advocate controversial ideas. They are the coercive tool of campus administrators, and they preemptively stifle dissenters through their armed and organized presence on campus.  

Furthermore, once dissent evolves into confrontational actions, campus police are empowered to arrest or otherwise coerce dissenting students, faculty, staff, and community members into compliance with the desires of the administration. Such intimidation and threats of violence intersect with broader trends of police violence directed toward systematically marginalized communities, reproducing systemic racism and classism and its attendant forms of violence on marginalized students and faculty members who are often outspoken critics of the administration because they suffer from the racist dynamics that campus police forces perpetuate. Campus police have also been used by administrations to try and intimidate, coerce, or even use force against faculty and graduate employee unions. Campus police forces thus exist in clear tension with the core AAUP value of academic freedom because their function as the administration’s coercive force inhibits advocacy of ideas that threaten the authority of those in power and reproduces reprehensible racist violence against marginalized students, faculty, and staff.  

While the presence and function of campus police forces exists in tension with the principle of academic freedom, the ways they are funded, controlled, and overseen often run afoul of the AAUP’s commitment to shared governance. According to the AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, faculty have “primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum . . . and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process,” and, even in areas outside of faculty primary responsibility, there should still be “agencies for faculty participation in the government of the college or university.” Campus police may not fall directly under the primary responsibility of faculty, but faculty should still play a role in their oversight, accountability, and policy making. Generally, however, campus police forces are ultimately accountable only to the university president and the governing board. This poses two related problems. First, unlike municipal police forces, which are ultimately accountable to elected officials and therefore to voters, a university president is an unelected figure appointed by a governing board. Public safety on campus is therefore in the hands of an individual who is not accountable to the university’s “public” of staff, faculty, and students. This problem of public oversight is only exacerbated when campus police forces arrest and investigate reports of criminal activity outside of campus boundaries, or when municipal police are called on to do the same within a campus, further confusing lines of accountability.  

Second, and related to the issue of public accountability, is the perennial struggle over finances and which aspects of the college or university’s mission are prioritized through funding. Campus police force budgets have, in general, only increased over time, and their departments are often protected from budget cuts that are imposed on academic departments, effectively undercutting the primary educational mission of the institution in favor of expanding the administration’s police force. Campus police forces thus pose a threat to the principle of shared governance because they are not accountable to faculty and the campus community in any direct or meaningful way, and they often directly compete with academic units for scarce financial resources, attenuating what the AAUP views as the core purpose of higher education: research and teaching.  

These problems of unaccountability and resource depletion put campus police forces in opposition to the AAUP’s fundamental value of ensuring that higher education serves the public good. Campus police forces are not immune to the racist dynamics of US public life, and, in a moment of widespread democratic reckoning with the thoroughly racist history of US law enforcement and its ongoing effects, colleges and universities should be spaces that allow us to imagine new approaches to public safety. The AAUP does not claim to have an easy answer or formulaic policy remedy to undo the racial inequities and injustices perpetrated by policing. However, the current state of policing is in clear tension with the ideals of a free and fair democratic society in which marginalized faculty, staff, students, and community members should not fear violence from agents charged with their protection. Campus police forces currently disserve the public good because they are not subject to public pressure from campus communities, they function to repress dissent that might make them more accountable to those communities, and they threaten the safety and freedom of BIPOC community members through their presence and increasing militarization.  

Because of the dubious history of campus police forces and their incongruity with core AAUP values of academic freedom, shared governance, and higher education for the public good, we believe it is consistent with the mission of the AAUP to pursue efforts, both at the chapter and national levels, to transform campus public safety. 

Campus Police Working Group

Megan Horst (Urban Planning), Portland State University, chair
Michael Hames-García (Philosophy), University of Oregon
Rudy Fichtenbaum (Economics), Wright State University
Michael Magee, AAUP staff

Read the full report On Campus Police Forces.