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> Undergraduates who live in an MIT residence or fraternity, sorority or independent living group (FSILG) must begin packing and departing this Saturday, March

• kyeb 7y ago
  >In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead? The dorms have shared bathrooms, often shared rooms with doubles, triples, and quads, and shared living spaces (lounges, study rooms, laundry, etc.) in addition to the dining halls. Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. Since mine has a dining hall for us to eat, it has only one kitchen for the entire dorm, which is ~500 people. Edit: It's also worth pointing out that MIT students are at very low risk right now. Sending us all home before we're at a medium/high risk level is the right move, so students aren't bringing it home with them. Nobody on campus has tested positive yet (as far as we know), and once it reaches the campus it would spread like crazy. Better to preempt it and send us away now.
  • iokanuon 7y ago
    >Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. There's a big demand because universities are packed with students that don't cook for themselves. Why hasn't the same happened to the US then?
    • CydeWeys 7y ago
      There are plenty of fast food places/corner stores/restaurants/groceries in Cambridge within walking distance of MIT dorms. So the "no way to eat" part is a bit dramatic.
      • kyeb 7y ago
        The closest grocery is Target in Central square, which is extremely limited or maybe Trader Joe's, which also isn't the same. The Star Market that was right behind campus closed a couple years ago. It's not so easy, in my opinion.
        • CydeWeys 7y ago
          That Target is less than a mile from all of campus, and a quarter mile from the closest dorms. That's easy walking distance. What am I missing?
          • porknubbins 7y ago
            I’ve seen like most of Boston on a bike share under an hour. There is zero reason students in a dense major city couldn’t buy groceries.
          • perennate 7y ago
            That Target barely has any groceries, it's a small general department store. But yeah there is Trader Joe's, H-Mart, and Whole Foods. Market Basket is a bit further but more like a real grocery.
            • CydeWeys 7y ago
              Yeah, the point is there's a wealth of options for food within a an easy hour round trip of walking (not just specifically the one Target). And a lot more if you have access to a bike. People are not going to starve to death when the alternative is walking 15 minutes to a grocery store. Let's be real. Downtown Cambridge is NOT some food desert like what exists in other parts of the US, where you could walk for hours and not reach the nearest grocery store (this is particularly prevalent in rural areas).
  • generationP 7y ago
    Oh, I forgot their undergrad dorms are a lot more youth-hostelly than the grad ones I remember.
  • komali2 7y ago
    Ok, so a population that is majority not at-risk and extraordinarily self-contained is going to be instead distributed into the wider population en masse? Seems insane.
    • chris11 7y ago
      I think most students would be more self-contained off-campus. Going entirely online helps, but I wouldn't call college downs clean. Clearing them out is a good idea.
    • akiselev 7y ago
      MIT is not "self contained," it's in the middle of the Boston metro less than a few miles away from dozens of other schools including large universities like BU and Harvard. The university can send most of its students home. It can't stop the rest of the world from interacting with them in the middle of a regional hub.
    • dnhz 7y ago
      What would instead happen is that students would go on spring break, quite a number of them traveling of town. Some of them would pick up the virus and then it would spread among the student body over the remainder of the semester. That's a plausible scenario that no university would want. Better to have them go home and stay there.
  • eternalban 7y ago
    > Nobody on campus has tested positive yet (as far as we know) Have any been tested? How many have been tested? I am not sure how one determines "risk" (?) with this asymptomatically contagious disease that lingers on surfaces and can travel in aerosal form a few meters. The people at "risk" are the older generation [the parents ..], and movement of people contributes to spreading of the disease. I think MIT is just off loading hot potatoes here.
  • souprock 7y ago
    Many decades ago, the health department should have shut down the shared bathrooms and shared bedrooms. We knew it wasn't OK as soon as we agreed upon the germ theory of disease. It would be great if this disease would finally put a stop to the madness of typical dorm living conditions. An extra benefit would be a huge reduction in conflict. Roommate conflict is stressful and often leads to violence.
    • nradov 7y ago
      Seriously? What kind of school did you attend where violence between roommates was common?
  • vonseel 7y ago
    I kind of wish we had dorms for college graduates thinking about a 500 person dining hall, but I doubt that would be good for the COVID situation.
  • dheera 7y ago
    As a fellow MIT alum I still feel that this was a wrong move. Online classes -- GREAT Cancel social events -- GREAT Encouraging students to go home -- GREAT Requiring 4000 students to pack up in a span of a week, getting help from other students to dismantle lofts and home-built furniture and moving heavy boxes, sharing push-carts, sharing vehicles, renting vehicles used by god knows how many strangers, scouting nearby supermarket parking lots for grocery carts because all the dorm push-carts are gone, pushing carts full of boxes around town to storage facilities, cramming hotel rooms, travelling via flights -- BAD I think Stanford's approach is much more reasonable -- they are letting students stay if they wish but are encouraging students to go home.
  • phyzome 7y ago
    Low risk? The Kendall Square area of Cambridge is the very center of the outbreak in the Boston area. That's where MIT is, and where the Biogen headquarters are. Many MIT students will later be discovered to have been exposed, and then exported the disease to places around the US and around the world.
• ryeights 7y ago
  >This is strange. Isn't the travel they are forcing quite possibly a cure worth than the disease? Many (most?) students already travel for spring break, so this shouldn't result in much more travel than usual. I imagine that is what motivated their timing on this.
  • bsder 7y ago
    I was going to suggest this as well. I'm surprised more universities aren't cancelling before their Spring Breaks so that students don't bring it back.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • gowld 7y ago
      They should cancel when spring break starts.
  • caseysoftware 7y ago
    MIT Spring Break starts on March 20th (at the latest, depending on exams) so it looks like they're taking advantage of the timing. Most students would already have plans to leave so this is less disruptive than during the term and potentially less risky than waiting until end of term. Ref: https://registrar.mit.edu/calendar https://registrar.mit.edu/calendar
    • gizmo385 7y ago
      They might have plans to "leave" and go on vacation/visit friends, but not necessarily to move. Those are quite different things.
  • kart23 7y ago
    International students are gonna be in a very tough spot, especially those from china.
    • 7y ago
• vesinisa 7y ago
  Not a lawyer, but that sure sounds shady as hell. Where I live student housing, even in a dorm, is subject to normal tenancy laws - meaning eviction requires long notice etc. Even saying to someone they need to vacate their home in less than a week could turn out very expensive for the landlord in court.
  • CriticalCathed 7y ago
    I imagine in case of the safety of the habitation there probably would be exceptions made. You know, an emergency or crisis of some kind. An act of god. I would imagine that if this went to court and the laws had a carve-out for that... Anyone with legal knowledge of MA willing to chime in on this?
  • throwaway5752 7y ago
    MIT has an office of the general counsel and a baker's dozen of high qualified and experienced attorneys (not including supporting staff). It is possible they are violating the law, but it's probably worth assuming they aren't and understanding why. It may be related to the MA governor declaring a state of emergency a couple of hours ago.
    • CydeWeys 7y ago
      People are too quick to try to apply law governing private parties to governments and other similar institutions. Schools and universities can do a lot of things differently than, say, a private company can.
      • jimmaswell 7y ago
        Why should they be above the law?
        • CydeWeys 7y ago
          They're not above the laws that apply to them.
• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? They are worse for MIT’s apparent COVID-19 policy of cancelling as much on-premise work and study as possible, since dorms have non-zero labor requirements. Student return-home living arrangements may also have that feature, but it's probably not MIT’s problem, and in any case student return home probably has less marginal effect on the requirements for non-family labor at their home than their impact at MIT.
• beezle 7y ago
  Everything I have read is that young people are at the lowest risk, if at all, of even getting COVID-19. Why not leave them in place and let the professors (over a certain age) teach remotely? Hate to think about how anyone with a lab is going to finish - there's not much remote in that.
  • warrenpj 7y ago
    My understanding is that young people are at lower risk of severe symptoms, but they can still get infected and transmit the virus to others.
• gevz 7y ago
  I’m not sure about mit schedule, but at Harvard, which announced same measures earlier today, the students has to vacate dorm rooms at the end of the academic year anyway. This happens at the end of April. So essentially Harvard is asking students to move out 6 weeks before the end of the year. One of those weeks is spring break. I’m sure students are in shock and there is a lot of chaos on campus. But according to what I heard preventive school closings are much more effective comparing with reactive closings after people are already sick. I hope it is for the best and feel bad for all the parties - both students and school administration that has to basically abandon all work and figure out what and how to proceed. What I am concerned about is this case in town next to Cambridge where elementary school student tested positive and school remains open with “advice to self-quarantine” for “close contacts”. The town officials thought it was sufficient to close and disinfect the school for one day and then to reopen it again. I find it very disturbing.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    And assuming they're refunding them... They can live basically anywhere for as cheap as a dorm room in MIT or Harvard. Sure, major inconvenience. People aren't gonna be homeless and die.
  • kopochameleon 7y ago
    Agreed it is a bit disturbing how seemingly lightly K12 schools have been treating cases, which is possibly an indication of how lightly they will treat impending local outbreaks like that in Cambridge. I get there are fierce arguments on the side of keeping them open, NYC schools for example pointed to their free- and reduced-lunch program as why they can't close or go remote, (& that students don't have computers at home, or that parents rely on the school as babysitting). This Seattle school figured out measures for handling lunch and remote schooling availability, at least: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/10/us/covid-19-seattle-washington-home-schooling-remote.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/10/us/covid-19-s... Especially in these early days, dispersal of dense populations can easily mean saving many lives. We need to flatten the curve so spread rate does not exceed hospital bed availability. Nobody's saying we won't all be extremely inconvenienced by this, but slowing the spread will mean that inconvenience does not include many avoidable deaths. And now is the time to do everything we can. In weeks, once we feel the effects more closely, it is too late to make an impact. This comic puts it well, the goal is to flatten the curve: https://twitter.com/SiouxsieW/status/1236721200291655680 https://twitter.com/SiouxsieW/status/1236721200291655680
• mygo 7y ago
  > In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? There is literature on respiratory infections in dormitories: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0196-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0196-4 It’s unfortunately paywalled, but the original authors claim they’re working on getting it more openly available
  • presumably 7y ago
    https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2019-12-06/f645/10.1038@s41370-019-0196-4.pdf https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2019-12-06/f645/10.1038@s41370-... > “ Our study was conducted at one U.S. university, which may limit generalizability.“
    • mygo 7y ago
      The topic under question is the respiratory hygiene of dormitories as compared to living in a house or other living condition. The N that is under consideration is the number of dorms, and the people who live in those dorms. There are pros to having the study done on a single university if there is a large enough sample of students and dorms. Since they all were in the same university, it makes it easy to isolate for the dorm variables in a way that wouldn't be as easily accomplished with multiple universities. [Same university, different dorms] isolates for dorms, keeping the university constant. [different universities, different dorms] does not inherently isolate for just dorms, since there may be compounding factors present due to known or unknown variables present in different magnitudes in different universities. Some universities have many dormitories. My alma mater had 18 different dorms and an 30,000-40,000 undergraduate student enrollment. It was like a mini city, complete with its own area code, police department, and post office. If you lived in a dorm, you could go a whole semester without stepping foot off campus if you wanted to. The vast majority of undergraduates lived in dorms during their underclassman years. You can get good data from 18 different dorms and tens of thousands of students. And arguably you can get good data with an even smaller number of dorms and students.
• ijidak 7y ago
  Probably, the better way to view these measures by various organizations is in terms of liability. Child gets sick at home, that's on the parents. Child gets sick in a dorm, that's on MIT. That might explain a lot of the drastic reactions by institutions everywhere. You can't let yourself be accused of doing too little. It's probably less liability for doing too much than the potential liability of doing too little. (Disclosure: Former MIT grad, not that that should be relevant.)
  • Symbiote 7y ago
    > Child gets sick in a dorm, that's on MIT. I'd argue that they're adults, but from the rest of this thread (not allowed to cook, not trusted to keep clean, restrictions on alcohol, without a genuine lease on their home) maybe you're right. When do American students / young people learn these things?
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
• monadic2 7y ago
  Not really sure what you’re expecting in a society that recognizes individual liability but not collective issues.
• kennxfl 7y ago
  >In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? They would be liable for not taking action against the Virus. Personal homes are much safer especially because all movements and interactions are accounted for. In a dorm, that's basically guesswork at best.