Synopsis: One use of “American exceptionalism” refers to historical studies that provide varying explanations for a consistently small and weak working class movement in the United States. This chapter builds on one such explanation: that since the late-17th century, the working class has been fragmented along what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “the color line.” A persisting cross-class alliance among whites—through which working class whites function as auxiliaries to the ruling class—has stymied working class unity and resistance. Nonetheless, evidence abounds of uprisings on the not-white side of this color line. Rebellions in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015 serve as two recent examples. With the campaign and election of Donald Trump, a cross-class uprising of whites is reasserting the functional utility of the color line in U.S. American politics, a counter-insurrectionary move responding both to increasingly successful resistance by poor people of color and to the normalization of color-blind multiculturalism.

Synopsis: This chapter details developments that shape contemporary campus policing strategies by connecting these to broader social, discursive, and technological histories. We analyze the campus policing apparatus in terms of weapon deployment, surveillance assemblages, policing tactics, and the discursive regime of securitization that they rely upon.

From the introduction: This chapter considers literatures that analyze new accountability policies in higher education alongside a case study of an instance where these policy trends contributed to new surveillance practices. It begins to answer how contemporary trends in higher education policy transform into surveillance practices at colleges and universities. New accountability, or performance-based budgeting, is a contemporary fad observed internationally among policy-makers (Birnbaum, 2000). Unlike primary and secondary school policies (Apple, 2010; Gilliom, 2010; Lipman, 2010), higher education policy has not usually specified exactly how institutions must meet those performance metrics established by governing bodies. Nonetheless, institutions are required to report performance to state bodies and often to public audiences. The case study included in this chapter allows us to better understand how these policies gain legitimacy and are transformed into practices based on local-level actors’ translations of these policies into organizational, technical, and managerial practices.