From the UW-Madison Center for Campus History, Reorientation is a podcast exploring the history of UW you won’t get on your campus welcome tour. Each season takes a deep dive into a historical topic that sheds light on the university's past and helps explain its present.
Season 1: Campus Police
Season 2: Campus Housing
This episode explores alternative student housing options like fraternities, sororities, and cooperatives, examining their costs, benefits, and potential lessons for broader housing solutions.
22 Oct 2025
Segregating the City
This episode explores the historical roots of housing inequality in American cities, examining how zoning policies and urban planning shaped segregation.
22 Oct 2025
Discrimination By Design
This episode explores how American universities grappled with housing diverse student populations following World War II due to the GI Bill and Baby Boom.
22 Oct 2025
Housing Is a [BLEEP]
The hosts discuss the challenges of navigating campus housing and the Madison rental market for University of Wisconsin students, offering insights for newcomers in this episode.
22 Oct 2025
High Rents and High-Rises
This episode explores the specific challenges of finding affordable housing in Madison in 2025, questioning why it remains a significant problem for university students and whether universities should intervene.
22 Oct 2025
Educated and Unhoused
Brooke Evans shares her experience as a University of Wisconsin-Madison student facing homelessness, highlighting the struggles of students meeting basic needs.
25 Nov 2024
Who Gets A Say In Safety?
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?
18 Nov 2024
Codified Cops
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.
18 Nov 2024
The Morality Police
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.
13 Nov 2024
The Wild Wild Midwest
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.
13 Nov 2024
Secret Police
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.
4 Nov 2024
Real Cops
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.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
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