Evolution of campus law improves women's safety.

Recent case law indicates courts believe schools' relationships to their students should be more business-like, which means women students and employees can now expect and demand a reasonable standard of care.

Robert Bickel and Peter Lake are professors of law and co-directors of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University's College of Law in Florida. They spoke on facilitating student development within the law at the NASPA conference in March.

While researching their book The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risk of College Life? they found "the law was becoming counterintuitive with respect to student development," said Bickel.

Evolution of campus law

* In loco parentis, the 1960s attitude toward students, was never the true legal theory behind the student/university relationship in the safety and wellness sense, they said. It died because schools were using it to suppress students' fundamental civil rights.

* They called the next decade the "bystander era," which encouraged schools to distance themselves from students with respect to tort law, using signed waivers for all activities. "This was the notion that we are legal strangers with our students and that we should not intervene across the board in student life," Bickel said.

* Next came an era of shared responsibility between university and student. Today, schools must "exercise control by extending foreseeability rules in situations where the safety of women students is compromised," he said.