College Not Expected to Assume
Parental Role Toward Students

On college and university campuses, the end of the 1970s signified more than just the death of disco.

In 1979, a federal appeals court handed down what has proven to be a landmark decision regarding the extent to which officials in higher education are legally responsible for the actions of their students.

Four years earlier, Donald Bradshaw, a sophomore at Delaware Valley College in Pennsylvania, attended a class picnic. Sophomore class officers had planned the outing, which would be held off-campus. A college faculty member served as an advisor to the sophomore class.

Nearly half a dozen kegs of beer were purchased for the picnic, even though most of those who would be attending were under Pennsylvania's legal drinking age of twenty-one. The faculty advisor had co-signed the check for class funds that was used to buy the beer.

Additionally, fliers--printed on college equipment--announcing the picnic were circulated about the school; they featured drawings of beer mugs.

Bradshaw left the picnic in a car driven by another student. Evidence later showed that the student driver was intoxicated. En route back to the college, the car in which Bradshaw was a passenger collided with another vehicle. The accident left Bradshaw a quadriplegic.

Ultimately, Bradshaw sued the college, the student driver, the town where the accident had occurred, the company that had sold the beer for the picnic, and the manufacturer of the car in which he had been riding.

By the time the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit heard Bradshaw v. Rawlings in October of 1979, however, the issue to be decided was the duty of care the school owed Bradshaw.

In years preceding Bradshaw's lawsuit, courts frequently characterized the role of a college or university toward its students as in loco parentis--a Latin phrase meaning "in the place of a parent." The doctrine of in loco parentis held such schools to a high degree of care for the welfare of their students. But the Bradshaw court noted that times had changed. It agreed with US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's observation in 1972 that students "often have values, views and ideologies that are at war with the ones which the college has traditionally espoused or indoctrinated."

Moreover, by 1979 the law had greatly expanded the rights and responsibilities of college-age individuals. The Bradshaw panel pointed out that--in Pennsylvania alone--eighteen-year olds could marry, vote, wager at racetracks, hunt without adult supervision, and qualify to enter such diverse (and often hazardous) professions as veterinary medicine, nursing, and firefighting.

Administrators and faculty in higher education, the court acknowledged, "have been required to yield to the expanding rights and privileges of their students."

Directing that judgment be entered in favor of the college, the court proclaimed that "the modern American college is not an insurer of the safety of its students."

Bradshaw has been cited repeatedly as authority for the notion that colleges and universities do not hold the level of responsibility toward their students that the law previously imposed.

The decision does not, however, relieve an institution from any responsibility toward its students. For example, liability may ultimately be found following the recent death of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student from alcohol poisoning after a fraternity party. Prosecutors in that state have considered seeking criminal sanctions against university officials, claiming that their alleged reckless conduct resulted in the student's death.

Nevertheless, Bradshaw--and numerous decisions since--have rendered the concept of in loco parentis for colleges and universities all but obsolete.

Published in the Summer 1998 Edition of In Brief