In Loco Parentis?: The Boundary Work of Campus Police

Abstract

Campus police officers lie at the intersection of policing and higher education, two institutions that make strange bedfellows. While police enforce laws and ensure public safety, universities prepare young adults for careers and lives. Despite this incongruity, campus police are common. In 2011-2012, nearly two-thirds of U.S. colleges and universities employed sworn officers, with the power to arrest lawbreaking students or divert them into within-school discipline (Reaves 2015). Criminal-justice involvement, educational attainment, and legal entitlement or stigmatization all impact young people’s life chances, rendering officers’ sanctions critical to social inequality.

Despite the prevalence and centrality of campus police, we know little about them. In this dissertation, I first draw on historical, legal, and rhetorical evidence to build a theory of campus police as boundary workers for (more or less) total institutions (Goffman 1961). This theoretical framework extends the typical legal story of the birth and death of the doctrine that colleges act in loco parentis (“in place of parents”) for students.

Drawing on this framework, I next examine cross-campus variation in officers’ student-oriented boundary work. Using data from interviews with 60 officers working on 10 college campuses, I find that while most officers abhor student violence and non-compliance, officers working with more privileged student bodies (1) draw stronger boundaries between them and campus outsiders and (2) have greater faith in the efficacy of within-school sanctions over criminal-justice ones. These findings suggest disadvantage for students of color and for students on less privileged campuses.

I then draw on this same data to probe the institutional boundary work of campus police departments, which straddle the divergent worlds of policing and higher education. I identify four strategies that departments use to navigate this contradictory institutional location: Traditional Municipal Police; ‘Wannabe’ Municipal Police; Traditional Academic Police; and Transformative Academic Police. These strategies vary in their level of insularity and in the institution with which they most closely identify (policing or higher education). The Transformative Academic Police, who embrace their academic location and their enduring in loco parentis role, are poised to lead community-oriented reform efforts in policing writ large.