The Case for Care
There is a worrying trend in institutions of higher education: unsubstantiated securitization of campus at the expense of individual and community support. It started in 1999 in the wake of the tragic Columbine shooting, and has monotonically increased, gathering steam in 2007, 2012, and 2018 (Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas respectively). Time and time again, we are shaken by horrific acts of violence and scramble to find solutions. Setting aside the debate around guns and control, let us explore the (re)actions of schools in the wake of such massacres.
Overwhelmingly, the institutional response in the US has been to tighten security — metal detectors, security guards, so-called school resource officers (SRO’s), and technological surveillance tools have found their ways into classrooms housing students as young as age six; many popular ed-tech tools are effectively spyware with an outdated user interface. Common sense — or at least common practice — might tell us that such efforts are valuable. After all, how can you stop a criminal if you do not know where they are, or without a good guy with a gun?
These justifications ring hollow. A large body of analytic research has demonstrated that there is virtually no empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of campus securitization efforts. At least as far back as 2008, researchers have been shedding light on the unsubstantiated nature of this securitization logic on campus. Famously, the SRO’s at Marjory Stoneman Douglas sought shelter at the sound of gunshots.
Not only are these measures unjustified, there is reason to believe that such escalations of power actually increase the incidence of violence on school campuses. This research is supported by results from the 2006 (and 2010) School Survey on Crime and Safety, conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics. Clearly these security measures stand to be questioned.
This is all to say nothing of the impact of such visible securitization measures on mental health: the anxiety of being watched while being implicitly or explicitly told you are not safe. And of course we must recognize the racialized and classed nature of such measures: the presence of a cop on campus means something different to a poor Black student than a wealthy white one. Surveillance has always been a tool of oppression, from schoolyards to factories to prisons. Surely we deserve better, especially at school.
The discrepancy between evidence and action is even more egregious when we consider the systematic devaluation of direct student support. From Reaganizing multicultural student support offices into low-budget student clubs, to underfunding of mental health services, to a veritable moratorium on tenure-track faculty hiring, institutions of higher education consistently devalue human labor in favor of the mechanized security solutions so often hailed as the high-tech hammer to fix campus crime. Across the country we see a marked increase in racist violence and a coincident (though not coincidental) decrease in general student mental health.
Why is it that campuses do this? Are administrators ignorant of the research? Do they simply reject it? Is it just the insatiable hunger of consumerism, inspired by clever marketing and amplified by billion-dollar institutional budgets? Yes. The cool logic of “the fastest way to safety is security” complements the chilling effect of quantitative data analysis and its economy of scale. The multi-billion-dollar private security sector has been all too willing to capitalize on this. It is much easier to collect (and thus narrate) quantitative data than qualitative, and it’s a lot cheaper to pay once for a few hundred security cameras than hire several full-time mental health professionals.
The trend of investment in tech over people is not unique to school campuses. We see this in the recent push for cost-saving telehealth apps, hastily-assembled caucus reporting tools, and the explosion of data-driven techno-consumerism and the app-powered gig economy. Since starting this essay, I’ve seen this techno-positivist knee jerk reaction in real-time, with hundreds of tech professionals scrambling to solve CoViD-19 using their software stack of choice. This is to say nothing of the “sacrifice the weak for the economy” rhetoric floating around the American right.
Ironically enough, a great number of these so-called solutions promise peace of mind through commoditized counselling and housework on a whim. These apps promise a smooth path to comfort — we can relieve ourselves of the daily grind without decreasing our productivity — but such infrastructures introduce another kind of friction. In smoothing the human-computer interface, we harden ourselves against the anxiety-inducing emotional labor of vulnerability and care.
This labor can (and does) take many forms on campus: available and accessible in-person mental health services, direct student-administration interface, high-touch teaching, peer-mentoring systems, and investment in the local community. It’s listening, responding, and following-up. It’s not implementing prescriptive and reactionary approaches to safety, like security cameras, SRO’s, and ed-tech.
What I’m calling for is inherently human and inherently valuable, despite the low-low price of an instant download. If you’ll permit me to paraphrase both a famous neoliberal economist and a Marxist, that cheap app reifies the devaluation process — its price tag indicates to users that the labor is low-value, and so it maintains the misogynistic and callous politics of the technologist.
It seems that the only human labor institutions value is that which formalizes existing power structures. The well-documented crisis of the academic job market has largely spared STEM departments, where many schools (mine included) continue to expand. Such is the case in campus security as well, where many schools are mimicking the militarization of municipal police, sometimes literally with legislative action to expand their power by upgrading them to “Peace Officers,” all in the name of care.
Some argue that campus security personnel play an important role in the health of a school’s community. If this is the case, should they not be a part of the community? A safer and more just campus is not made by criminalizing its students, faculty, and staff, but by asking all of us to work to make the space safer. We do this by empowering communities on and off campus to call out injustices and promote restoration, not by reinforcing pre-existing systems of power. We must invest in care and those who provide it, rather than power and its foundations. We are staff, faculty, and students, not suspects. We need such warmth from our communities, not the chill suspicion and fear inspired by policing and surveillance.
This coldness numbs us. Administrators become callous against critique, since they “know education best.” Teachers, professors, and advisers chastise us for failing to focus on our work. Our fellow students, made precarious and anxious by schoolwork and examinations, simply mind their own business. Even ostensibly politically-engaged “student leaders” cynically dismiss this as “biased” or “too emotional,” buying in to the frigidity of technology. If this is how the world works, why fight it? It’s so much easier to become the abstract platonic student. But we know this is not true.
Across the US, students, faculty, and staff are calling for a reorientation. Graduate workers have unionized to provide support for each other at the University of California, Columbia, University of Wisconsin, and many more. Professors recognize these problems and discuss them in their (often humanities) classrooms. Students are staging sit-ins to protest the cynical treatment of staff, faculty, and students.
There is a reason you are reading this, and a reason I wrote it. We know a better world is possible. If we make ourselves vulnerable and provide appropriate care — if we perform this emotional labor — we become more than suspects. We become human.
