Reorientation

Episode 7: It’s a Reorientation first! We just couldn’t fit everything into six episodes, so this season we’re going one more and bringing you up to speed with some of UW–Madison’s most recent protests. How has UW organizing changed in fifty years? Or has it at all? What are students worried about today? And does it have anything to do with the generations of students who’ve come before them?

Episode 6: The call is coming from inside the house! A call for meaningful change, that is. What does it look like when the goal of a protest is for students to hold their own university accountable? Whether it’s confronting a culture of racism or fighting for LGBT rights, it turns out the protests themselves seem pretty familiar. 

Episode 5: You know the stereotype: college students don’t live in the real world. All they care about is themselves and what’s happening on campus. When they protest, it’s always about stuff that affects them. Well, if that were true, we’d have absolutely nothing to tell you in this episode about, say, students organizing against US military intervention in the Middle East, or successfully pushin...

Episode 4: Teach-ins. Marches. Occupying buildings. Tear gas. Clashes with cops. A firebombing or two. Turns out things tend to escalate when you’re trying to stop an unjust war… a war that you yourself could get drafted to fight in. The anti-Vietnam War protest movement at UW-Madison in the 1960s and 70s was nothing short of explosive! (That’s foreshadowing, by the way.)

Episode 3: Winter 1969. Black students at UW lead a weekslong strike that grinds the university to a halt. Their demands aim to make the overwhelmingly white institution more welcoming and accountable to minority students. Today the strike is remembered as one of the most noteworthy and successful protests in UW history. But there’s much more to the story than just a few weeks of civil disobedienc...

Episode 2: We all have to start somewhere, even when it comes to learning how to protest. Maybe begin with something small like fighting with school administrators over a plaque. Then move on to something a little bigger like labor organizing in the dining halls. Before you know it you’ll be staging a decades-long fight against housing discrimination!

Episode 1: The Vietnam War! Civil Rights! Responsible traffic patterns on shared roadways! Whatever the cause, UW students have never been afraid to make their voices heard with a little bit of civil disobedience. But where did our reputation as a protest school come from? And why is protesting such a quintessential college thing to do? Maybe some Boomers have the answer.

Episode 6: Okay, enough history. We’ve pretty well covered that finding a place to live in Madison has been hard for a loooong time. But what are the specific challenges in 2025? At a time when college is theoretically more accessible than ever, why is housing still such a problem and, in some ways, a bigger problem than ever? And since it’s an issue that directly affects universities’ students (a...

Episode 5: In 2016, Glamour Magazine published a profile on Brooke Evans, a UW-Madison student who was working on her degree while homeless and living in her car. But as remarkable as Evans’ story was, it’s not unique. Students at UW and campuses across the country are facing homelessness and struggling to meet basic needs, whether or not administrators and policymakers acknowledge it. 

Episode 4: So far we’ve talked a lot about dorms and the rental market. But there are other places where college students live. You just might not necessarily think of them as housing. Fraternities and sororities house thousands of UW students, but they come with high costs and exclusion. Housing cooperatives offer cheap rent and community but they’re not for everyone. Are there lessons to be lear...

Episode 3: 1945. It wasn’t just all Frank Sinatra records and red lipstick. The end of WW II marked the beginning of a huge change for American universities. Between the GI Bill and the Baby Boom, college enrollment exploded in the midcentury. A college education wasn’t just for a select group of white students anymore. Students of different races and ethnicities, different religions, and differen...

Episode 2: Zoning policies! Urban planning principles! School district designations! Are you excited yet? To understand the housing situation in a city like Madison, it helps to understand how urban spaces in the US came to look the way they do. Because it wasn’t by accident. We’re heading back to the late 19th century to see how the foundations of housing inequality were built into American citie...

Episode 1: To kick this season off, we present to you our very own Reorientation unofficial, quick and dirty newcomers’ guide to campus housing at UW. From day one in the dorms to braving the Madison rental market, it’s everything you need to know! (Disclaimer: This guide is neither quick nor dirty. There are no easy answers to winning the housing game in Madison. It’s a mess!)

Episode 6: This season we’ve looked at more than 100 years of campus police history. But what about the present? What does having a full-blown law enforcement agency on campus mean for both the UW and the broader Madison community today? And what would it look like to imagine a future of campus safety without campus police?

Episode 5: It’s taken us five episodes, but we’ve finally gotten to the moment when UW-Madison campus police became real, official law enforcement. To understand how that happened, though, we need to talk about some wild 60’s protests and an unsolved murder. 

Episode 4: Ticketing cars or busting up parties is one thing. But the history of policing behavior on campuses also includes much darker chapters. At UW-Madison, campus police and administrators led a 15-year shadow operation to purge gay men from the university. 

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

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

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