"While most students are still apathetic about the problem, most are realizing it's a simple thing to practice safer sex or abstinence," says Dr. Beverlie Conant Sloane, director of health education at Dartmouth.

About 20 concerned Dartmouth students, most of whom are heterosexual, this year formed a group called Responsible AIDS Information at Dartmouth (RAID), which is attempting to teach students about AIDS. Among the planned activities are "road shows" with skits about AIDS that will travel to all the campus dorms, says senior James R. Bramson, RAID's co-founder.

Part of the problem with controlling AIDS in college is that "nobody's really sure them-selves where they've really been," Bramson says. AIDS "spreads pretty easily on a campus, even if [the students] aren't especially promiscuous," he says.

Dartmouth is only one of some 30 schools nationwide that in recent years have instituted peer sex education with an emphasis on AIDS information.

UMass has a Peer Sex Education Program, which arms students with free condoms to distribute when they hold safe sex information sessions in the residence halls, which house some 12,000 students.

And at UCal Berkeley, about 12 students are receiving course credit for taking a class and leading a volunteer project in which they lead discussion in sexuality and AIDS education, according to Cara L. Vaughn, the public information manager at the Student Health Service.

Berkeley has also distributed more than 1000 copies of a handbook called "AIDS Education on the College Campus," which resulted from a state grant the school received to develop a model for AIDS education on campus, Vaughn says.

Cornell has taken strong measures to combat the AIDS crisis, despite its relative immunity because its campus is far from a major city, says health educator Sandra Caron.

It's "amazing" that Cornell recently created a position within its health service to deal with sexuality, and AIDS in particular, says Caron, who has held the post for a month. In the past five-and-a-half years, Caron has set up peer sex education groups at some 30 schools nationwide.

AIDS Awareness

During AIDS Awareness Week early this month, many schools took the opportunity to present slide shows, speakers, and panel discussions, and to distribute condoms, booklets and safer sex kits to student.

In western Massachusetts, the entire five college area was involved in AIDS Awareness Week, where speeches and panel presentations were well attended, says Debra Edelman, a health educator at UMass.

Tufts invited various speakers for the week, including Janet Mitchell, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and author Cindy Patton.

But Director of Tufts Health Education Mary Sturtevant says she thinks the week was overscheduled, because the turnout for many of the events was disappointing.

At Dartmouth, AIDS Awareness Week became AIDS Awareness Month, Conant Sloane says. This month the school has hosted speakers from the medical community and set up displays about the disease and about safer sex.