"Stop the violence"; "Every child is due due process"

These are three follow up articles to the Drexel student assault post.

It's almost a year since John Chapman, the burly self-described ex-"hoodlum" who headed the school district's crisis team, arrived at University City High School, a place overwhelmed by fighting and assaults.

Today, Chapman is the school's principal, but he has yet another crisis on his hands.

"You've got to stop this madness!" Chapman reportedly told students there yesterday, in announcing the arrest of four seniors in a videotaped assault that has shocked the city. "Stop the violence!"

--------------------------------

Lou Williams is both the dean of students and the boys' basketball coach at University City High School.

"I'm the dean of students first," Williams said yesterday. "That's my first priority. Basketball is second."

Either way, Williams does not have an easy job. Four students from the school - one a varsity basketball player - were arrested after they allegedly beat and nearly killed a Drexel University graduate student in West Philadelphia on Friday afternoon.

--------------------------------

Crimes committed near the University of Pennsylvania campus have received much attention lately. There have been roving gangs of youths mugging students, teenage girls beating random victims, the fatal shooting of a man at a diner, and, last week, a university sophomore shot and wounded at 38th and Walnut Streets. The college experience there has become filled not only with classes and campus activities, but with groups of students organizing to escort one another home after dark.

Unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania is not alone in confronting danger. Drexel University, Penn's neighbor to the north, has been combating a resurgence of urban crime in the last year. The streets are not safe at night for the collegiate population, and students are experiencing for themselves what Philadelphia's more violence-prone neighborhoods have dealt with for decades.

Students at schools in West Philadelphia's University City sometimes have a realistic approach to crime; it is just a part of going to school in any big city - as much a reality as the high rents. Others, however, will settle for nothing less than an absolutely safe and pristine campus - through any means necessary.