Campus crime has become both a marketing issue and an asset preservation factor for America's colleges and universities. Those who govern and manage the nation's campuses must endeavor to lessen crime risks-and the perception of them-in order to protect institutional image, enhance student recruitment, and avoid costly lawsuits stemming from an alleged failure to protect students and employees from criminal miscreants.
Admittedly, amelioration of crime problems and shllful adaptation of risk management techniques are relatively new concerns for academic administrators; the ravages of campus crime, and the high visibility given the topic in the news media, emerged as major issues in the late 1980s, and promise to so remain in the foreseeable future. A few decades ago it was unthinkable for a student to sue a college or university about a n y t h g , yet today it has become commonplace. In lawsuits brought by crime victims, not just institutional assets and reputations are in jeopardy; now individual administrators and employees are sometimes sued personally, with the prospect that they could have to pay to defend the suit and any resulting award of damages out of their own pockets.
How best to meet the challenge? The first step for college and university administrators is to understand the legal theories, or grounds, for suits that have been successfully asserted in litigation brought by student victims of campus crime (Smith and Fossey, 1995).
There are four potential grounds for successful suits in this area. Three of these involve duties that colleges and universities may owe their students. The first is a duty to warn about known crime risks. The second is a duty to provide reasonably adequate security protection. Courts across the country now have clearly established that colleges owe their students these two duties, and