Riot police called after U of Dayton students take to streets following closure

I haven't seen the details of UD's arrangements, but in the case of MIT yesterday, they explicitly provided an exception for students who didn't have any other housing to return to. It would be a sign of extraordinarily bad management at UD if they didn't provide the same.

> This seems like illegal eviction to me.

I discussed this in the MIT thread yesterday, but contract law does provide mechanisms for invalidating or modifying existing agreements under extraordinary circumstances. The doctrine of force majeure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure), for instance, under which both parties to a contract can be relieved of their obligations if some unforeseeable, unstoppable outside force makes it impossible or impractical for them to meet them. American contracts commonly have a force majeure clause included with the rest of the legal boilerplate.

One potential wrinkle here would be exactly what legal standard would be required for the coronavirus to qualify as a true force majeure. Massachusetts and Ohio both declared states of emergency due to the coronavirus yesterday; I suspect it's not a coincidence that universities in Boston, MA and Dayton, OH waited for those declarations before they started taking these types of actions.

"The University reserves the right to repossess student rooms and residence hall facilities in the event of an epidemic or other emergency as defined by the University."

Happy I live off campus.

This is one of the most monumentally stupid things I've seen in response to COVID19, stupider than hoarding toilet paper and drinking colloidal silver.

I suspect the University will be taken to court and fined quite a bit for this. Some students left homeless will sue for civil damages.

Happy days for lawyers in Dayton. Students not so much...

> There's a huge chunk of student[s] for whom that IS their housing. Full stop.

This is addressed explicitly right up front:

> UD housing will close at 6 pm March 11. If you are approved for an extended stay or housing over spring break, you are permitted to stay.

It can't have been that much of a struggle to figure out?

No idea what somebody from out of the country is supposed to do when their university throws them out with a week's notice or less. (Particularly after paying tuition, housing costs, and the like.)

I think a lot of illegal things are going to “just happen”, and some will get sorted out in courts months or years from now. (And some never will, like the potentially impending medical treatment collapse in prisons.)

In the current moment, I think it’s just going to be a matter of “might makes right” or at least “might makes progress” until the courts untangle it way down the line.

And those were just your ordinary everyday illnesses! Now imagine how widely a virus that's two to five times as transmissible as flu would circulate through a dorm environment. It ain't pretty. And while those infected dorm residents themselves might be young and healthy enough to not have the infection be life-threatening, they could then carry it out of the dorms to all the other non-students they interact with every day, lots of whom aren't so demographically fortunate.

Closing the dorms is the right thing to do.

Also: stress, like having to leave your home and travel to wherever else you can stay, or like being literally homeless because you don't have anywhere else you can stay, can severely weaken your immune system, as can sleeping on the streets.

The only real solution for a lot of these kids would be to bunk up, two, three, five, ten to a home, which is vastly worse for containing infection than letting them stay in their dorm rooms (assuming people are being careful).

There is much pressure on administration from faculty now, some of whom have an actual risk of dying, to close down teaching activities. What will also happen is that some faculty members will refuse to teach because of justified fear of catching deadly disease. Best to do an orderly shutdown now than panic a month from now.

Keep in mind that many of these students would need to travel at the end of the term anyways. There are benefits to shifting that travel sooner in time, especially since they're mostly-healthy right now. Get the traveling done while it's low risk, on the assumption that risk will increase over time.

> Officers in riot gear attended the scene and shot pepper balls at students

Welcome to the future, citizen.

https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/police-responding...

There isn't a "sure, you live here, but you don't have rights" designation because historically such designations were abused.

Given the way this virus spreads and how long you can be spreading it before you realize you are sick, once it gets into an on-campus housing unit it has a very good chance of infecting most of the students.

Sending the students home will send most of them to lower density housing, with bathrooms and showers and dining only shared with a handful of people (e.g., their parents and siblings).

For a given student, this changes things from something like "if any one of these 200 other people get it, I'll probably get it" to something like "if any one of these 4 people get it, I'll probably get it".

That's a vast improvement.