Wichita ? From racial protests and concealed carry laws, to sexual harassment and the tone of this year’s presidential election, higher education officials in Kansas are saying campuses need to be prepared to deal with a wide range of security issues.

That was just one of the topics that the Kansas Board of Regents discussed Wednesday with CEOs of the state’s six Regents universities during the board’s annual retreat.

“Security issues on campuses date back to the 1960s,” said Regents general counsel Julene Miller, referring to anti-war and civil rights protests of that era that frequently turned violent.

More recently, though, Miller said the Board of Regents started broadening its review of security concerns, starting in 2009 in the wake of a mass shooting two years earlier on the Virginia Tech campus that left 32 people dead.

photo by: Peter Hancock

Wichita State University President John Bardo, right, and University of Kansas Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little address the Kansas Board of Regents during a retreat Wednesday in Wichita that included a wide-ranging discussion about security issues on college campuses in Kansas.

That year, she said, the board hired a consultant to review security procedures and protocols on all six campuses and to make recommendations on how to improve them. It then set up a standing committee to meet each year with representatives from each campus to receive updates on how those recommendations are being implemented.

The job of that committee got even larger in recent years when the Kansas Legislature passed a bill requiring local governments and higher education institutions to begin allowing people to carry concealed handguns in public buildings by 2017.

Even more recently, though, a growing number of criminal complaints about sexual attacks on campuses, and lawsuits alleging violations of Title IX requirements, are prompting officials to take additional measures to protect women and minorities from violence on campus.

The University of Kansas is a defendant in at least one such federal lawsuit, as is Kansas State University. In fact, Regent Shane Bangerter said, there have been enough lawsuits in Kansas that Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s office has asked the board to come up with a policy for determining which cases will be referred to his office and which ones will be handled by the schools’ in-house counsel or by outside counsel.

KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little said she did not know how many Title IX lawsuits the university is currently involved in, but she said KU is still handling them through in-house counsel.

Officials from most of the other universities, however, said their counsel’s offices aren’t big enough to handle that type of litigation, and they are either referring them to the attorney general or hiring outside attorneys.

Meanwhile, Wichita State University President John Bardo said he is growing more concerned about another potential threat to campus security that has emerged just in recent months: the rising level of acrimony over this year’s presidential election.

“Emotions have been running so high, I’m really quite concerned that no matter which party wins, it’s not going to be over,” he said. “There’s such a serious amount of emotion in this thing, it’s more than anything I’ve ever seen, maybe since Nixon.”

Regents President and CEO Blake Flanders said there are several things universities can do to ensure security on campuses while still protecting students’ rights to free speech. But he said the most important thing is maintaining good relationships between campus police departments and local law enforcement in the cities and counties where campuses are located.

“A memorandum of agreement is one piece of paper,” he said. “But a good working relationship is an entirely different matter.”