Killing zombies on campus just isn't as much fun as it used to be. Students at Bowling Green State University once carried Nerf guns for a week each semester, shooting the zombies before the creatures could tag them. Participants were seen by most bystanders as nerdy but harmless kids who liked role-playing. These days, bright plastic Nerf guns…

The gun smoke had barely cleared from the lecture hall at Northern Illinois University where last week a former graduate student had executed five students before killing himself when local and national scribes began speculating about a new trend in mass murder American-style. The "Chicago Tribune" Web site, quick with coverage of the…

New to the curriculum at many colleges this fall will be instruction for students in survival skills. The training material will not be like Clemson University's "College Survival Skills" Web site, which features useful advice on note taking, studying for exams, and dealing with professors. Rather, a new security DVD, Shots Fired on Campus:…

This article describes how colleges are seeking the best ways to respond to dangerous incidents like the shootings that occurred at Virginia Tech, and how best to alert people on their campuses to various threats to public safety and emergencies.

People can bring guns most places in Arizona, but the state's Board of Regents has long banned all weapons from public college campuses. Now some lawmakers are trying to change that. State Senator Karen S. Johnson, a Republican, proposed a bill in January that would trump the regents' ban, allowing anyone with a concealed-weapons permit to carry a…

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…

This month a company in Spokane, Washington, plans to release "Shots Fired on Campus," an instructional DVD with strategies for preventing and surviving a gun rampage. About 50 colleges have ordered the video, and its creators expect to sell several hundred more this fall. Since the massacre at Virginia Tech last year, colleges everywhere have…

In this article, the authors as assistant professors of teaching and learning at Northern Illinois University react to the campus killings. They share their stories and sentiments regarding the campus killings. They state that their prayers and condolences go out to their campus, to the families of the lost and wounded, and the family of the young…

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. …

This article reports how researchers at Virginia Tech, working in a variety of disciplines, are studying the long-term effects of the campus killings 10 months ago. After the killings, administrators at Virginia Tech realized that their normal institutional-review process for research proposals was not sufficient to deal with the likely onslaught…

Cho Seung-Hui was the 23-year-old English major who calmly and methodically gunned down 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech last week before killing himself, leaving the campus and the country stunned and sorrowful. Along with the grief have come questions about what, if anything, could have been done to prevent Cho's rampage. Some…

At even the best-prepared universities, there is no playbook for handling the crush of tough decisions that comes after a mass shooting rocks an otherwise quiet campus. While colleges and universities have always had tragedies, recent occurences like the shootings at Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech have fundamentally changed the way…

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…

Gregory A. Love, then a student at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, was beaten in 2002 with a baseball bat by a fellow student in a dormitory shower after Love made what his attacker perceived as a homosexual advance. The attacker was later convicted of aggravated assault and battery. Love sued Morehouse, arguing that the institution was liable for…