Student protests across the UW system are as old as the universities themselves. One project is working to archive that history, specifically at UW-Madison. It’s called Sifting and Reckoning. It shares the history of student protests and uncovers the exclusion and violence toward marginalized groups on campus. Kacie Lucchini Butcher, the director of the Rebecca M Blanks Center for Campus History, shares about the project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
There's a long history at UW, and the UW system, of having a politically active student body. Clearly, today is no different. What was the genesis of this project that you worked on?
The Public History Project came out of the rediscovery of the presence of the Ku Klux Klan on campus in the 1920s.
So, in the 1920s, there were two student groups on campus that bore the name of the Ku Klux Klan. Following the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, Chancellor Rebecca Blank commissioned a committee of historians to study the Klan's presence on campus and report their findings. And in that report, there was kind of this, I think, a historians question, which was, we know all this information about the Klan, what about everyone else? What about all the other histories of discrimination and resistance?
I was hired in 2019 to look into that exact question: what is the history of discrimination and resistance to discrimination at UW-Madison? And our goal was to make all of our findings very public. So, we ended up doing a physical exhibit called Sifting and Reckoning. But we also did a digital exhibit website. Then, we did public lectures. We go to lots of classes and we put out a final report. All of this was really geared at how do we educate the campus community about the history of UW-Madison, and in particular, histories that we don't often want to talk about.
As you said, this work was supported by leadership at the university. What does it mean for an institution to be reflective and to shift and reckon with its history?
It's hard to understate what a radical idea it is right, for a university to critique itself. Universities are very obsessed with brand management and of telling very specific stories about themselves. And so to open up a project like the Public History Project and say, hey, tell us all the worst things about ourselves, the most complicated things about our past, I think that's a very radical act.
There were definitely other leaders on campus who did not think that was the right decision. There were definitely people outside of the campus community who said, you know, why are you doing this? Why would you pay for that? But in my conversations with Chancellor Blank and with others on campus, she said, how are we going to make better decisions if we don't know about our past if we don't know the full history?
It's going to be hard. It's going to be difficult. It's going to be uncomfortable. But that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. And that's really an ethos we still take forward with us. We know that the histories we talk about are complicated and difficult. We know that they sometimes upset people's viewpoints about UW, but that doesn't mean they're not worth talking about. They are still a part of our history, whether we like it or not.
You and your team has archived so much history — student life, classrooms, housing, athletics — is there anything in here that surprised you?
I mean, I think one of the things that was hard for me when I first got here is I was like, you know, how are we going to prove to people that racism has happened here, that discrimination has happened here?
Sometimes, you know, people have this deeply held viewpoint about UW in particular, that it's a liberal place, that it's a good place, and that that kind of thing doesn't happen here. But instead, we kind of had the opposite problem. We found too many instances of discrimination and racism to include in the exhibit, and so we really had to start pulling back and saying, OK, what are these kinds of exemplary moments?
Or what are the stories we really want to tell about this place? There were a couple of themes that weren't surprising, but something that I thought was important to highlight is that students have been protesting since the beginning of UW. Our students are civically engaged. They're very, very active. They have a lot of political opinions, and they love to express them.
And that's political opinions on all sides, OK. And so that was important for us to show. The other thing that was important for us to show is that some of the best parts of UW-Madison, the things that we look to as successes, the things that create belonging that make students who are marginalized feel a part of this Badger community, were things that students demanded.
Students know how to make the university better. It is often the administrators and university leaders who fail to listen to them.
>> More information on the Sifting and Reckoning project
As you're out on campus today with the students around you, what are the demands that you're hearing from some of the protests and encampments on campus?
I always teach my students a quote from Frederick Douglass where he says, power concedes nothing without a demand because you need to ask for what you want to be different. I think with universities, there's a metaphor that they're like a giant cruise ship. And so you can't really turn the ship quickly. You have to make these small movements over time. And our students are often the ones who are making those demands or those asks of the university.
Today, the students have a full list of demands, that are available online, and one of them is divesting from companies that support Israel. But they also have other concerns about housing, about cops on campus. They have a robust list of demands that come from their experience on campus and, and their desire to see a different campus community.
You talked about police on campus, and that was one of the histories that you all have archived, which is the overly aggressive nature of UW police. I'm wondering in this time, as we're seeing across the country in some of these encampments, how has the state or the university re-acted? Is there a history of repression of student voices?
The short answer is yes. There has always been some type of police response to student protests on campus. The varying degrees, I think have really been different.
One of the ones that gets talked about the most is the Dow protests. They are sometimes called the Dow riots. And not only was the Madison police and the university police involved, but the National Guard was called in. And what you have after this moment is all these very violent images coming out. I mean, we have images of like women being beaten with clubs, students being teargassed and maced, and they're very violent images and very violent videos.
And they actually worked counterintuitively. So once people saw this video and these images once people saw the crackdown, more students came out to protest. And we have oral histories from people who said, you know, I was just walking by going to class and I got teargassed. And then they joined the protests the next day after kind of meeting that state violence head on.
So, the crackdowns that universities envision on these protests usually have the opposite effect of what they want. And you can see that playing out right now on college campuses across the US. It happened at Columbia; it happened at UT Austin. You can pick an example. The more harsh the crackdown, the more students, faculty and staff who show up the next day.
Because it's not a good thing to see, you don't want to see your campus community exercising their right to free speech and then meeting police violence. Sometimes, the UWPD in our history has not responded. They've just let students protest and kind of been there in case something pops up. And generally speaking, the protests happen. Students will negotiate with the administration, and then the protests will fizzle out once demands are met or once there's a kind of an action plan for change on campus.
And so this idea that somehow to keep campus safe, we have to escalate, that there has to be a police response. I think that that response and that plan of action has often worked opposite of what the university wants. It has usually increased protests.
What comes next for for this project and what comes next for your team's work?
We're first eternally grateful to student journalists. We utilized in our project student journalism from every single decade, pretty much. And so the journalists who are out here are really like kind of eyes and ears on the ground, and they document these protests from so many angles. And so that's going to be hugely beneficial.
But us as a center, in collaboration with the university archives, we try and collect as much as we can. We've already collected fliers that have been handed out by the university administrators, by the protesters. We're going to collect some of the protest signs and preserve those, because we do try and collect in the moment. And we really want to make sure that this is going to be documented, especially because it is part of this bigger national movement. And so people will want to talk about this. So, on the ground, we're trying to document as much as possible and to really get students to think of documenting themselves.
Students often don't think of themselves as historically important enough. And so we want to kind of empower them to think like, hey, in 50 years, people will want to know how you guys organize and how you talk to one another and how you came up with your demands, things like that.
As far as the center broadly, the reason that we're out here today is that we are here to not only document the history of the university, but to share the history of the university with our campus community. We will continue to do that work, not only researching the university's past but making it accessible to the public. Right now, that includes talking a lot about our rich history of student protests.
What's a part of this conversation that you think is missing from an archivist point of view?
I think the student voice is being documented, but I think there's a lot of faculty and staff out here who have stepped up, and particularly at other schools where you have seen, like pretty violent repression. So like Columbia or UT Austin, there's been this movement of faculty and staff to, to really say to get our students, you have to go through us, and we haven't seen as much of that.
There's been quotes from faculty and staff in the student newspaper, but I think really documenting the ways in which faculty and staff have showed up to support and have often put themselves at risk, particularly non tenured faculty, is something that we'll have to cover and something that you don't always see in the history of protest either.
I also think tying these movements together. So, whether it was the Black Power movement in the 60s or the divestment movement from apartheid South Africa, or it's this protests. Our students are not doing these things in a vacuum. They are looking at what other students are doing, and they're joining movements that link across to us. I was telling a student, in 20 years there will absolutely be a book about this. There will be a book about these protest movements all linked together.
And so this is we're living history, and we're trying to get our students and faculty and staff to see that.
