Reorientation

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 (and faculty and staff) should universities be doing more to fix it?

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 learned from alternative housing that could help solve the bigger problem?

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 different class backgrounds were all coming to campus for the first time. And they needed somewhere to live.

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 cities.

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.