Within one week, two horrifying crimes occur in Harvard's backyard. The administration says everything is under control. But is anyone really safe anymore?

The city is a dangerous place.

We are told time and time again, but it never really strikes home until one of our own is stabbed or raped in our own neighborhood. In light of recent crimes, students and faculty alike are wondering how safe they really are.

First, University police reported that a young woman who is the daughter of a Harvard affiliate was raped by an intruder in her Linnean St. home.

On Thursday of that same week, Mary Joe Frug, 49, a feminist legal scholar at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, was left to die on the Sparks St. sidewalk, stabbed by an unknown assailant.

In a meeting that followed the Frug slaying, Cambridge Police Lt. Harold Murphy reported three other recent assaults on area women, including a sexual assault in nearby Somerville, a sexual assault near the Alewife subway station on the Arlington-Cambridge border and an assault and attempted kidnapping in the parking lot of the Porter Square Galleria.

Cambridge City Manager Robert W. Healy referred to the series of crimes as "a spree, a rash." And several observers theorized that the crime wave was an unfortunate side-effect of the coming of spring.

Socio-psychological rationalizations aside, the question most on the mind of many in the Harvard community is a simple one.

Am I safe?

With Harvard Police still working on what Chief Paul E. Johnson said yesterday is "an open investigation" of the Linnean St. rape, and with state police and the district attorney's office still working to find a suspect or a motive for the Frug stabbing, Harvard students are provided with almost daily reminders that all is not well in Cambridge.

Especially in the Frug stabbing, doubt about the particular facts of the crime has affected the public mood. If the Bunting fellow's killing was a random crime, then there is more reason for fear than if the stabber had been out to get Frug specifically, as some have suggested.

Jill Reilly, a spokesperson for the district attorney's office, said yesterday that investigators have interviewed more than 200 people in connection with the Frug slaying, including students from both Harvard and the New England School of Law.

The recent crime wave has also brought about the resurgence of latent student unease about campus security efforts. Many, especially women, seem to think the administration isn't doing enough.

In an April 1990 survey conducted by the College's Special Committee on Security, 58 percent of women said they knew of "places where there is an excess of shrubbery which might offer protection to assailants." And 62 percent of women said they did not believe "the patrolling of the campus by police and security guards is adequate."

Only 41 percent of men said they knew of excess shrubbery, and a full 66 percent of men called the patrolling "adequate."