UCop: A Small Town Tale of Big Cop Ambitions

Actual policing and administrative policing are two sides of the same coin at UConn's rural campus as the intersecting violence toward pro-Palestine encampments and a gender studies professor reveal.

©Mark Mirko for Connecticut Public.

The last 20 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the protests that have followed have laid bare the workings, intentions and sheer violence that American universities are capable of unleashing on their own students and faculty. The prioritization of wealth, the embrace of border regimes, an illogical worship of Israel, and submission to right-wing ideology have been revealed as guiding priorities as universities choose to protect their investments, criminalize free speech and protest, and heavily engage policing mechanisms on campuses.

Media coverage of the current crackdowns against student protests have been oversimplified and narrowly framed in the form of “Harvard versus Columbia,” with “good” Harvard “courageously” resisting the Trump administration’s most blatant pressure and “bad” Columbia cravenly caving to Trump’s coercion. These high-profile cases not only obscure parallel fights playing out on smaller and less elite campuses nationwide, but also feed a vague notion that universities have become battlefields solely because of Gaza. There is a convenient national amnesia about a much longer history of police violence against student protesters at American universities.

The last two decades have not only seen increased police surveillance on campuses and the extensive use (and abuse) of the criminal justice system for handling campus civil disputes, but also policing’s bureaucratic counterpart – corporate-style “compliance units” with sweeping powers, creative administrative strategies to restrain progressive curricula, obstruct careers of outspoken faculty; and the use of budgetary concerns as an excuse to usher in conservative agendas. Actual policing and administrative policing are two sides of a very sharp-edged coin.

I have had front row seats to the inner workings of two massive public universities on the East Coast. I spent almost a decade at the City University of New York (CUNY) getting my PhD in Comparative Literature and teaching at Baruch College and Hunter College in Manhattan. These were the precise years during which 9/11 and the War on Terror penetrated the heart of the academy. Surveillance of “radical” academics, the slandering of Middle East studies programs and courses, tracking the library books people checked out as a way of monitoring “terrorist inclinations,” canceling this or that speaker, and overt anti-Muslim racism were par for the course during this time. Sounds familiar?

My next decade was spent as faculty in the English department at the University of Connecticut at its main Storrs campus. At first, the move from the country’s most diverse university in the heart of New York City to a predominantly white, rural environment was disorienting – marked, above all, by an overarching sense of uneventfulness and a constant and loud kind of calm. I realized over time that the university was overrun by forms of bureaucracy – a fleet of deans, provosts, officers and administrative assistants overseeing any and all manner of things, and there were a bewildering array of procedures to get anything done from securing a parking spot to getting a new course approved or getting reimbursed for travel or inviting a speaker. I began to discern a connection between the sprawling bureaucratic structures that made small tasks difficult and the fact that there was hardly any political and intellectual activity on campus. It was as if UConn deliberately produced and carefully sustained this sense of homeliness and mediocrity.

Over the years, I saw the occasional dynamic public intellectual being hired and trying to do exciting programming only to eventually give up and move away. Similarly, retaining faculty of color doing cutting edge research is almost impossible at UConn because of an alienating energy on campus that no amount of “nice” white sociality can make up for.

At CUNY, there was an overtness with which post-9/11 Islamophobia, carcerality and a neocon agenda could be witnessed, but at UConn, these same problems were cloaked by policy procedures and an aggressive insistence on apolitics, civility and congeniality.

Interestingly, both my institutions appear on the top 20 list of universities with the largest police departments in the US. Hunter College of CUNY ranks 20th – understandable (though not defensible) for its location in New York City’s hyper-expensive Upper East Side neighborhood.

UConn, however, ranks 8th – a small-town university with oversized cop energy.¹

UConn’s reliance on its campus police (which are “real” police – make no mistake) and the state’s criminal justice system to restrain and punish their own students and faculty – hand in glove, oftentimes, with their office of “compliance” – has reached extreme levels. Two recent examples feel like signs of the times: UConn’s violent crackdown on its relatively small pro-Palestine encampment last year, and the university’s extraordinary inquisition and termination of Sherry Zane, its director of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program, show just how ideologically right-wing, carceral and authoritarian the university has become.

Listening, caring and workshopping
American universities have come to be subsumed by a carceral logic; a reliance on the idea that our lives overall are better, safer and peaceful only if systems of punishment and imprisonment are strong. We are only free if unwanted members of the population are locked up.

The history of campus police is often traced back to 1894 when the first police department was established on campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.² Over time, almost all American universities have made cops an integral part of campus in the name of student safety and wellbeing, while history remembers a string of violent incidents from the mass arrests of students at the University of California Berkeley in 1964 (796 students detained and the police breaking up sit-ins for the Free Speech Movement, “dragging many on their backs down flights of stairs”)³ to the 1970 killing of four students and the wounding of more than a dozen at Kent State University during protests against the Vietnam War⁴ to police confrontations and arrests when students protested apartheid in South Africa, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, school shootings, rape culture and racism.

The big reckoning, however, came with the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis that went viral on everyone’s phones right in the middle of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic. As police departments everywhere came under new scrutiny, universities could not ignore calls for defunding and/or dismantling their police departments.

Movements such as Black Lives Matter and MeToo had awakened the liberal public especially with a much-despised Trump in power. An inadvertent effect of this was that university administrators had lapped up the language of anti-racism and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and presidents and deans wrote heartfelt letters about how disturbed they were by racist police violence and how important it was to have these conversations. Workshop culture and anti-racism training had peaked as a solution to anything and everything. Obsequious and loving letters by deans and presidents managed to drown out the closed-door administrative meetings where decisions were made. Unsurprisingly, very few universities actually defunded campus police. UConn was no exception.

Then-UConn president Thomas Katsouleas sent a moving, sensitive but firmly pro-police letter to students who were demanding the defunding of the UConn police, which enjoyed a budget of $17million at the time. Katsouleas characterized the police as beacons of public service, not simply responding to crime but also saving lives using CPR, stopping suicide attempts, and “aggressively pursu[ing] cases of bias and harassment, including those that are racially motivated.” UConn cops couldn’t possibly be racist, they were in pursuit of the racists. He reminded everyone that a majority of UConn police were trained in “Crisis Intervention” and even had a facility dog program. Katsouleas concluded by informing students that UConn’s police department was “a national leader in progressive thinking when it comes to law enforcement, and was a department with enlightened leaders who are always willing to evolve to best meet the needs of our community.” In other words, there would be no defunding of the Uconn Police.⁵

Rereading this letter now, what strikes me from the president’s rousing defense is that cops are everywhere all the time at UConn – from dorms to streets to games to classrooms – that they have a lots of power, and that they are involved in far too many aspects of campus life. The letter was a masterful display of emotionally manipulative language with words like community, trust, service, care, help and respect deployed deliberately. In fact, the word “community” appears 17 times in the four-page letter.

By the time the pandemic waned, numbers of students seeking university degrees seemed to be on the rise but the cracks within the actual institutions had become irreparable. Online classes for almost two years had instilled a deep-seated alienation among professors and students, and amongst faculty themselves. Instructors continue to perceive this today through a rise in absenteeism, lack of class engagement and, most instructors would agree, a broad learning gap.

With administrative and leadership staff carrying the bulk of the responsibility for strategizing and structuring during the pandemic, these offices and individuals ended up with a wider swathe of powers than before. And across almost all of the US, the university agenda for research and education was replaced by a post-Covid scarcity and survival paradigm in which it was important for the university to keep running at any cost. This meant making “hard choices” like cutting non-profitable majors and programs (often in the humanities), increasing class sizes, implementing more online courses and hiring more contingent faculty rather than tenure-track faculty.

Asymmetrical and disproportionate punishment
By the time the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests erupted, the stage had been set. The War on Terror had been continued by Barack Obama whose penchant for deportations and drone warfare was ignored by liberal Americans drunk on a post-racial fantasy. Just like this time around, back in 2016 too Trump had inherited a jackpot of war machinery, surveillance policies and border regimes when he came into power. The pandemic only strengthened these structures as states of emergencies tend to do. Universities were already flailing and the academic mission of producing knowledge and providing higher education was being continually co-opted by cold profit-mindedness and business reasoning.

The encampments for Palestine thus arrived at a moment in the history of American universities where corporate and carceral logic was already becoming the norm and almost every single radical category had been defanged and diluted. It made sense that students expressed their support for Palestinian liberation and called to end the genocide by pitching tents on their campuses. By modelling community through camping together, students had intuitively signalled their desire to end the alienation, defanged politics, increased bureaucracy and lack of community that so mark their institutions.

University admin and their beloved allies, campus police, would be having none of it. Zero tolerance and unchecked violence became the policy to break up encampments. The scenes of beatings, dragging, tasing, handcuffing and shoving were shocking. Universities like Columbia, Emory and UCLA bore the brunt, with police engaging in some of the most horrifying assaults on students.

At UConn, the encampment was smaller, but the response was ferocious and disproportionate. In a timeline constructed, vetted and cross-checked by various constituencies involved, the encampment lasted five days and comprised between 25-65 students.⁶ Within a half hour of students pitching tents, the police charged onto the scene, threw students onto the ground and cut up the tents. The UConn police injured one student, then tackled and arrested the student who attempted to help. Protests continued over the next few days with singing, studying, chanting and other communal activities. Cops surveilled the encampments during the nights and aggressed the students and faculty observers during the day. As for the UConn leadership, there were some fake gestures of care in the name of “wellness checks” coupled with a stubborn no-negotiations strategy.

All hell broke loose on the morning of the fifth day, when a large group of police officers charged into the encampments as some 35 students were sleeping. The almost 100 or so officers represented campus police and multiple units from the neighboring towns. In what became a concerted attack, the cops warned that they would be breaking up the tents and threatened arrests. Half an hour later, two lines of police officers charged the remaining 25 or so students and arrested them, confiscating property and ripping up tents. Not a single student resisted arrest, but each was arrested by 3-4 cops who used zip ties and metal handcuffs to restrain them and pack them into police vans. Twenty-five students and one alumnus were charged with disorderly conduct and trespassing, a group that came to be called the UConn 26.⁷

The students were released from police custody, but the university administration refused to drop the charges. It seemed clear that the admin had decided that these young students should be made to pay a heavy price for their nonviolent protest. Over a thousand faculty members signed a letter asking for charges to be dropped, while a social media campaign spurred more letters from the public, to no avail. Over the summer, students were made to appear in court in Rockville, CT – a jurisdiction known to take a hard stance in UConn cases. While the UConn26 were being put through the wringer, UConn leadership doubled down, instituting new punitive policies through a revised code of conduct which placed restrictions on outdoor gatherings.

©Mark Mirko/Connecticut Public. Originally published here

The students’ resilience was admirable, but holding out for trial meant the prospect of jail time. Students were offered “Accelerated Rehabilitation” as part of a plea bargain. “AR” is a pre-trial probation program reserved for first-time offenders and completion of the program could lead to the dismissal of charges in the future.

The “Free the UConn 26” campaign called out AR for what it is: a diversionary program meant to have a chilling effect on free speech. They also made the connection between the university’s and the state’s pressure tactics and American ideologies of carcerality. In an Instagram post, they asked: “Did you know that plea bargaining accounts for 95% of state convictions nationally? What then happens in a country where 1 in 3 people will be arrested in their lifetime? What kind of society so heavily criminalizes and so rarely provides a day in court?”⁸

And though I speak of the university admin as a collective, it is important to always bear in mind that these are only a handful of powerful individuals who could have changed course at any time and might have gained the appreciation of the ranks of faculty and students. This handful of powerful individuals have a favorite, wholly disingenuous line that has come to define UConn’s small town admin speak: “Unfortunately, it’s not in my hands.” Provosts and deans, in particular, are prone to declaring that they have no power; it is always someone else, somewhere else, pushing these policies and punishments.

This is how protests elsewhere in the US have played out, and continue to play out, amid the national and even global context of a cruel bias against Palestinians and Palestine – but again, my argument is that the structures deployed in the current moment are actually ubiquitous and more insidious than evidenced by this one glaring dynamic. I want to illustrate my argument about carceral academia and the university’s hyper-reliance on police and criminal justice systems through an example that has nothing to do with the ethos of protesting or opposing the university.

The inquisition of gender studies professor, Dr. Sherry Zane
For over one year, UConn has waged war upon Sherry Zane, an untenured faculty member who has been at the university for over two decades, having completed her PhD in History at UConn before assuming her teaching position. For the last seven years, Sherry was the director of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies program and proved herself to be a talented program builder, mentor to younger faculty, and a truly dedicated employee of UConn.

Out of the blue, the compliance office decided to conduct an investigation on Sherry after they received an anonymous tip about her supposed misuse of research and travel funds. Motivated by the notion that she had nothing to hide, Sherry dutifully complied with the investigation and provided all the information requested about her research and the details of all of her work travel, which had been both pre- and post-approved by her supervisor.

The compliance investigator, who has no experience in academic research or training in how research works, nevertheless issued a long report declaring all of Sherry’s research fraudulent – asserting that she was really on vacation, or spending on recreation – and then stating that, as an untenured, contingent faculty member, Sherry should not even be conducting research at all.

The report struck those of us who have worked with Sherry as ridiculous as it was disingenuous, The investigator not only interrogated Sherry for hours at a time but combed through years of Sherry’s emails and cherry-picked “facts” to create a tapestry of guilt. That the conclusions of an untrained investigator have set off a series of cascading events that have destroyed Sherry’s career and reputation is something that should have a deeply chilling effect on any of us who do research and is indicative of an unchecked surveillance culture that undergirds UConn and, surely, many universities in the US.

Some of the plot twists of Sherry’s case highlight the powers of the compliance office to twist reality. The funds that Sherry was accused of misusing came from her own research account, which was created by Sherry’s supervisor at the time to hold Sherry’s earnings from teaching summer classes. In truth, the research account is a sleight of hand employed by the university to get around restrictions on income earned for extra teaching, which technically cannot exceed a percentage of the instructor’s annual salary. The side account was created for Sherry with the understanding that it would be used for research, travel, books and so on. Every single trip had to be approved by higher admin before it happened, and then all the expenses had to be detailed after the trip for reimbursement. Several bureaucratic steps and supervisors were involved every single time Sherry initiated work travel or spending, belying any semblance of the daylight robbery the report alleges.

The funds Sherry allegedly misused, in the end, were not university funds nor taxpayer funds, but rather her own diverted wages – wages which she was made to earn twice, as they could only be spent on research for the benefit of the university and its faculty and students.

As the report went up the ranks of deans, provosts and the president – the same colleagues who had promoted Sherry and praised her work over the years – she heard versions of a familiar refrain: “Unfortunately, it’s not in my hands.” While Sherry awaited uncertain disciplinary action, she was not only suspended (with pay), but she was locked out of her office, her email was blocked, she was forbidden from setting foot on campus, and even from making contact or speaking with any UConn employee. She was criminalized, hit with severe measures unknown to UConn faculty charged with sexual assault or other serious crimes. But the truly shocking part was yet to come.

As Sherry obtained legal counsel and began to mount a defense – and before having the opportunity to defend herself in any sort of university disciplinary hearing – the university handed its so-called report over to the UConn Police, which duly issued a warrant for her arrest! She had no other recourse but to turn herself in at the UConn police station, where she was photographed and fingerprinted and charged with “Larceny 1,” a felony for which she is now awaiting trial in criminal court.⁹

As if this was not enough, the story of the investigation and the criminal case was served up to local CT newspapers and TV news, with university reps offering quotes. A media witch trial commenced, fueled by a disdain for “fancy academics” on spending “sprees.” The media snickered over research on Disney, hardly surprising work for an academic who teaches “Gender and Sexuality in Everyday Life” to 500 students every academic year, most of whom have their first “woke” moment when they learn that Disney princesses might be promoting negative stereotypes. Disney Studies is a well-respected field with a flagship journal, an academic association and annual conferences but no one looked that up. There was snickering about meeting a guy in Belfast where she was conducting innovative and important research on feminist murals in post-war Northern Ireland. In the age of Trump, a woman (feminist even!) in a gender studies program presented an especially juicy target, and the newspaper articles and the comment threads became grotesque displays of MAGA sexism.

The personal cost for Sherry was heavy as she began receiving hate mail at her residence and threatening voicemail, the newspapers having linked to the case online without redacting her phone number and address. Not a single newspaper contacted her in their “reporting.”

It was clear to me that a university compliance office, with full access to the breadth of information about faculty, can spin a tail capable of undermining any one of us.

Despite the extraordinary personal cost, Sherry brought a counterclaim against the university citing wage theft, defamation and, most importantly, lack of any due process. The university turned her case over to the police and wanted her tried in criminal court before even spending the necessary few weeks setting up a disciplinary hearing, and going through some sort of fair protocol.

Those of her colleagues who find the charges preposterous and have attempted speaking to the powerful members of admin to advocate for her have heard the familiar mantra: “Unfortunately, it’s not in my hands.”

The investigation continued to move up the admin chain going from one office to the other for several months. Various admin higher-ups played good cop, bad cop, mean cop, understanding cop with impressive acting skills. It was all meant to come to the same conclusion, and it did. Sherry’s job was terminated, and with a spitefully composed letter to boot.

Ultimately, it is hard to fathom what this inquisition and termination is really all about. Her commitment, dedication and obedience to the university have been well-documented over the years, with teaching awards and glowing evaluations from the same admin who have now fired her, despite years of the university’s reliance on her on various impactful committees, for building new programs, and for steering the popular gender studies unit. Perhaps she was viewed as outspoken. Perhaps she had shown sympathy for Palestine. Perhaps she fought too hard over the years for a stronger gender studies program. Perhaps she invited too many feminist scholars and Black scholars and Native American scholars to campus. It is not entirely clear whose side she was a thorn in.

But one thing is crystal clear: Sherry is being scapegoated and being made into a parable for any faculty whose research requires travel. Going after tenured faculty with large research funds is legally difficult but contingent faculty like Sherry can be dispensed with more easily as can the gender studies program that will likely fall apart without her stewardship. This is only the beginning, and the university has now created a precedent that can and will impact more faculty going forward. This is the start of the criminalization of all research that is not directly and monetarily lucrative to the university.

The criminal cases against Sherry on one hand, and the student protestors on the other, share one clear commonality: They illustrate the university’s willingness to spring cops onto their own students and faculty, deploying the criminal justice system in matters that deserve a careful, cautious internal resolution process. Both cases also reveal the university’s dangerous capacity for escalation with no regard for proportionality, and no regard for people’s lives.

These two stories unfolding simultaneously, for me, reveal carceral academia at its most naked.

-Bhakti Shringarpure

1. Zahaab Rehman, “20 Universities with the Largest Police Departments in the US,” Insider Monkey, March 26, 2024 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/20-universities-largest-police-departments-024154413.html

2. Jennifer Kaylin, "The Changing Face of the Campus Cop," The Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1996. https://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/96_11/cops.html

3. “796 Students Arrested as Police Break Up Sit‐in at U. of California,” New York Times, December 3, 1964. https://archive.is/qkaM9

4. Dan Kelly, "Kent State shootings: The 1970 student protests that shook the US," BBC, May 4, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240503-kent-state-university-1970-protests-that-shook-the-us

5. Letter to the Students from Thomas Katsouleas, July 27, 2020 https://draft-president.media.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3778/2024/01/2020-07-24-Defund-UConn-Police-1.pdf

6. Timeline of UConn Divest’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Including Community and Police Response https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ddn_hGshpIkHjLEmznJfFIhKX1MK3u6b/view

7. All the information on UConn26 https://linktr.ee/freetheuconn26

8. Free the UConn26, Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/free.the.uconn.26/

9. “Arrested professor Sherry Zane files civil action suit against UConn; cites wage theft, defamation, lack of due process” by Samantha Brody & Maanya Pande. https://dailycampus.com/2025/03/27/arrested-professor-sherry-zane-files-civil-action-suit-against-uconn-cites-wage-theft-defamation-lack-of-due-process/