The day after a Virginia Tech student gunned down 32 people last April, a young alumnus named Johnson Wagner donned a baseball cap with the VT logo. Then a rookie golfer on the PGA Tour, Mr. Wagner wore the hat while competing in a tournament in South Carolina. There, he voiced a concern shared by many people in Blacksburg, Virginia: "I simply…

In the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, a number of state legislatures are considering bills that would allow people to carry concealed weapons on college campuses. The author recently spoke at a conference on higher-education law, sponsored by Stetson University and the National Association of Student…

As a professor of law and higher education, Lake compares the April 2007 shootings to those at Kent State nearly 40 years earlier. The mishandling of the Kent State crisis brought heavy criticism of higher education, and a culture of rules, procedures, and policies arose to replace old patterns of using force and violence to manage conflicts. …

With more than a dozen American universities opening branches and campuses on the Persian Gulf, the oil-rich emirates of the Arabian peninsula are threatening to dethrone cities like Cairo, Baghdad, and Beirut as the academic centers of the Middle East. Wealthy, safe, and relatively stable, these emirates are vying to become the new intellectual…

Virginia Tech has decided to count gifts to a memorial fund for victims of the April 16 shootings toward its goal of raising $1-billion in a capital campaign. Higher-education fund-raising experts agree that counting the memorial-fund contributions toward the total does not break common donation-reporting guidelines. Many big college fund-raising…

At the University of Chicago, the third Monday in November began with an hour of violence. Around 12:30 a.m., an assailant fired a shot at a staff member who was walking on the campus. At 1:15 a group of men robbed two female students on a nearby street. Just before 1:30, Amadou Cisse, a doctoral student, was shot and killed while walking to his…

Educators, mental-health officials, and law-enforcement officers often do not share information about troubled students because they are confused by what they can disclose under complex and overlapping privacy laws, according to a report on the Virginia Tech shootings. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and two other Bush cabinet secretaries…

After the fatal shootings at Virginia Tech last April, colleges went shopping for hardware. They bought sirens, mass-messaging systems, surveillance cameras, and door locks. Some colleges armed their police departments for the first time. Others added assault rifles to their arsenals. "Active shooter" drills happened everywhere. As administrators…

The British government has published a long-anticipated report containing guidelines designed to help higher-education institutions combat Islamic extremism. The report entitled "Promoting Good Campus Relations: Working With Staff and Students to Build Community Cohesion and Tackle Violent Extremism in the Name of Islam at Universities and…

Discusses how Maoist guerrillas are attacking colleges as part of an effort to overthrow Nepal's government. (EV)

Discusses how the killing of three professors by a suicidal student horrified the University of Arizona and prompted colleges around the country to consider ways of heading off such rare violence. (EV)

Twenty-four people from all walks of college life, including a campus police officer, a scientist studying bioterrorism, and a Muslim student, tell how September 11 affected them. (EV)

Explores how, in the aftermath of the airplane hijackings and deaths at New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, academic freedom may be under threat. Provides examples of student or administrative action against professors offering different viewpoints. (EV)

Scientists doing research on primates are increasingly being subjected to threats and acts of violence from animal rights groups. The intimidation has resulted in many laboratories taking extensive security measures. Some scientists claim, however, that there is no surrogate for animal research in understanding human diseases. There are fears that…

A federal report finds that in 1995, 13% of colleges did not publish annual security reports required by federal law, and an equal number did not use the definitions of crimes prescribed by law. Common offenders were trade schools and colleges enrolling under 200 students. Among reporting institutions, 26% reported violent crimes, and 44% reported…