Sex assaults, harassment are top campus legal liabilities.

"Attorneys have recognized that they're going to catch us with our pants down," a risk management attorney told human resources managers at the CUPA-HR conference in Orlando in September. He cautioned that there has been an "amazing increase in litigation" over sexual assaults and harassment in the last 10 years because campuses have failed to protect themselves from liability claims and lawsuits.

Brett A. Solokow, a lawyer who created and heads the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, said sexual assault and harassment claims have overtaken the traditional "slips and falls" as the biggest source of claims against colleges and universities. A decade ago, they ranked only fifth on the list of sources of claims, which he called an "incredible sea change."

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Why the increase?

Supreme Court cases in the 1990s and more recently have established precedents that encourage litigation, Sokolow said. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 makes student-on-student sexual harassment a Civil Rights issue. But most schools have not taken steps to protect students and limit their liability, which encourages lawsuits.

While Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers harassment of one professor by another, many schools mistakenly apply the same standards to investigate complaints under Title IX. While Title VII makes employers responsible for protecting civil rights on the job, Title IX requires only that schools deal with potential violations that they know about, he said.

While "we're not responsible for harassment," he said of schools, "We're responsible for our response to it." The legal standard of "deliberate indifference" means that a school is legally liable if it fails to act after being given notice of sexual harassment or assault, or if the school's actions were clearly unreasonable in light of known circumstances.