Keep Your Campus Safe. Offer Ninja Instruction.

Three thugs harass a German medical student on a late-night train in Sydney, Australia, demanding he turn over his wallet. He refuses, and they follow him from the train station into a dark alley, where they trip him, steal his phone and iPod, and kick him.

But in the shadows lurks an unseen ninja warrior.

If this were a graphic novel or martial-arts movie, the ninja (who would turn out to be a waifish woman) would singlehandedly take down the three muggers. But in real life, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, the ninja in question, Nathan Smith, stepped back into Ninja Senshi Ryu, western Sydney’s ninja warrior school, and alerted his teacher.

Seconds later five black-clad ninja were sprinting after the muggers.

“We would have been just a silhouette,” said one of the ninja, Steve Ashley. “It was probably the worst place in Sydney where they could have taken him.”

“You should have seen their faces when they saw us in ninja gear coming towards them,” said the teacher, Kaylan Soto.

Because this isn’t a movie, the bad guys got away, but police officials said later that they had made some arrests in the case.

Might colleges make their campuses safer by offering late-night training for ninja? Couldn’t hurt. —Don Troop