8 ms·

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

95 points by antdke 7y ago

horsawlarway 7y ago
I'm struggling to figure out how closing campus housing is legal. There's a huge chunk of student for whom that IS their housing. Full stop. They paid rent. They occupy the space. They have no other home to go to. This seems like illegal eviction to me.
- nexuist 7y ago
  I'm in university right now and our housing contract has a clause stating: "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.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    That clause seems like the kind of thing a judge would immediately throw out the window when it conflicts with tenancy laws.
    - nexuist 7y ago
      This is a state university for what it's worth. I doubt they haven't already run it by lawyers.
      - dayofthedaleks 7y ago
        U of Dayton is a private, catholic university.
        kylebenzle 7y ago
        The guy you are replying to was talking about "his" school.
      - kamarg 7y ago
        Many contracts that have illegal/unenforceable clauses have been run by lawyers...
        kwhitefoot 7y ago
        > Many contracts that have illegal/unenforceable clauses have been run by lawyers... Many contracts that have illegal/unenforceable clauses have them because they have been been run by lawyers. They know perfectly well that most ordinary people are in no position to tell whether or not a clause is enforceable. My landlady when I was at uni (74-77) tried it on me not realizing that my girlfriend was studying land law and contract law at the time.
    - anotherman554 7y ago
      Only if the tenancy laws don't have an exception for college dorms.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      That assumes that the judge isn't crooked. Judges are locally elected, and they may not wish to go against the largest employer/donor in town.
  - bradstewart 7y ago
    Just because it says that, doesn't make it legal. I have no idea if it or isn't, but contracts can and do include illegal and/or unenforceable clauses.
- rpiguy 7y ago
  YES. 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...
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    Universities are in a difficult position here. You're probably right that someone will sue them for breaking their housing agreement. On the other hand, if they didn't break the housing agreement, and students in the dorms started sickening (or worse, dying), you had better believe the lawsuits would start flying pretty quickly as well. So, if it's not a question of whether you're going to be sued but on what grounds, you want to do whatever thing will leave you in the best position to defend yourself when the inevitable lawsuits start arriving. And given the medical consensus that social distancing is necessary to protect against coronavirus, if I were a university administrator, I'd much rather be defending myself against charges that I broke a contract than against charges that I recklessly endangered peoples' lives in order to not have to break it.
    - d4mi3n 7y ago
      This is a very good point that deserves discussion. That said, this isn't an either-or situation. Universities could easily arrange temporary off-campus housing for students displaced by the crisis.
      - smacktoward 7y ago
        They could, but would such housing be appreciably better at protecting from coronavirus transmission than the dorms? They'd likely be just as densely populated, if not moreso. If the university buys a couple of buildings and moves the residents of five dorms into those buildings, they haven't made things better, they've made them worse. The reason to close the dorms isn't because the dorms themselves are bad in this scenario, it's that packing people closely together is bad in this scenario. The virtue of closing the dorms is that it sends most of the students back home, spreading them out among the general population. Density is the enemy.
- danudey 7y ago
  I love that the headline says the students "took to the streets" after they were kicked out of their homes onto the streets.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Where else did they expect them to 'take'? If I don't have any place to go besides my dorm, I likely don't have a car either.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  > There's a huge chunk of student for whom that IS their housing. Full stop. 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 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.
  - Beldin 7y ago
    > One potential wrinkle here would be exactly what legal standard would be required for the coronavirus to qualify as a true force majeure ... for the institution. Getting kicked out of your house could easily be a force majeure for the tenant I'm curious how a force majeure clause applied to the current pandemic would help the institution more than its tenants.
    - kangnkodos 7y ago
      So if both parties are being relieved of their obligations, does that mean students get their money back for tuition, room and board? If you sign up for in person instructions, and then are told they are switching you to a YouTube video, you should be offered a choice to continue on the new terms or to terminate the agreement. If you are asked to leave your housing for part of the semester, you should be compensated for relocation expenses. If lightning struck one small campus dorm, the student would expect the university to immediately provide alternative housing or pay for a reasonable alternative and moving expenses. The same should hold if the whole campus was closed.
- sneak 7y ago
  Some places have banned gatherings, too, which, while good guidance to give out, I think might also be illegal. 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.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > I'm struggling to figure out how closing campus housing is legal. > 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?
  - deckar01 7y ago
    > If you are approved for an extended stay or housing over spring break, you are permitted to stay. That statement is pretty vague though. At my university you had to apply to stay in the dorms during breaks and I think there was an additional fee involved. I'm sure most of the students were planning on leaving, but now they have 4 day gap between when they have to leave and when they were planning on leaving. At my university, I believe only students in the condo style units with personal entrances were allowed to stay by default. Navigating the bureaucracy of an institution like this can be difficult for a young person, especially one with a busy schedule and short notice.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      If on-campus housing is the only housing available to you, then either (most likely) you already have the approval, or (not at all likely) you're in the same crisis now that you would have been in in four days. Neither of those is really an exceptional hardship. "I need to shift my flight up four days" is not a difficulty to be described as "that IS their housing, full stop".
- mschaef 7y ago
  I worry about this aspect of it too. When I was in school, I was in easy driving distance (3 hours) of stable alternative housing at my parent's place. Not everybody has 'stable alternative housing', much less available to them without a huge logistical challenge. 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.)
- h1srf 7y ago
  As a former international student, even regular breaks when school would close the dorms were tough. Winter/Spring break especially. Back then there was no AirBnb and no one would do short term rentals. I do not envy those students with nowhere to go. Plane tickets while cheap-ish due to the outbreak may still be out of the reach of college students.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    UD has explicitly said international students can stay in their dorm rooms -- see https://udayton.edu/studev/health_wellness/healthcenter/coronavirus/index.php https://udayton.edu/studev/health_wellness/healthcenter/coro....
    - h1srf 7y ago
      Ah, missed that. I'm glad for them.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    There wasn't an international dorm at your University? My University had a dorm for international / special circumstances kids that never closed over breaks. I assumed that was normal.
    - h1srf 7y ago
      Nope. Small private school. I think as I was graduating they started operating some dorms full time.
- tssva 7y ago
  Ohio tenant laws specifically address the circumstances under which a student tenant can be evicted and this would violate them. However the governor has declared a state of emergency which does grant the executive branches powers they normally would not have. It may be within the power of the Ohio Department of Health under the state of emergency to force the university to take such an action. I don't know that it is but is would not be totally surprising if it was.
recursive 7y ago
https://twitter.com/univofdayton/status/1237517695081279488 https://twitter.com/univofdayton/status/1237517695081279488 > 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. Students should take any items necessary to continue their education from home as well as other essential items in case time away is extended. How are they so sure that students have any other home?
- OJFord 7y ago
  Presumably when they're not is exactly when those students 'are approved for an extended stay or housing over spring break'?
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    Requiring approval will still inevitably leave some students homeless, especially when requesting it is likely to take longer than the eviction deadline.
    - strictnein 7y ago
      Better to just do nothing then, since the alternate isn't perfect.
      - crooked-v 7y ago
        There's a long way between 'perfect' and the current situation of 'horrible'. For example: giving more than 24 hours notice, and not doing it in the middle of spring break while many students aren't even physically there to get their stuff.
gumby 7y ago
MIT (and I imagine other schools) say that if you can't leave (specifically calling out as examples visa issues, not having another home, or having a home where you could not safely go) that you don't have to move out. Not sure why this school would not make the same allowance.
nathanaldensr 7y ago
I guess a "riot" is defined as "young students milling around recording with their cellphones."
- pulisse 7y ago
  According to TFA: > Officers in riot gear attended the scene and shot pepper balls at students
  - a3n 7y ago
    So, the police rioted.
    - 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
      I guess it's time for news outlets to dust off the old reliable "the protest turned violent".
- _cairn 7y ago
  Yes, but clickbait.
- grecy 7y ago
  Yes, when you peacefully gather in 2020 to express your disapproval of something, the police will show up in riot gear and shoot you with pepper balls. Welcome to the future, citizen.
- dillondoyle 7y ago
  Also the local news - and a lot of twitter videos - make it look like a party. Beer and everything. Like the opposite of 'limit crowd contact' adding in a ton of germs from drunk college partiers. https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/police-responding-report-large-crowd-campus/iitOG3z311QvsCFzdq4CrI/ https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/police-responding...
abeppu 7y ago
Aside from the significant question of whether you can just kick people out of the place they paid to live with no notice, is it a good idea from a public health perspective? If you have a large population of mostly healthy young people who might carry the virus with few or no symptoms, is telling them all to leave and inevitably travel to other communities even wise? My uninformed, cynical fear is that these moves are based on someone in the school administration worrying that the school will be somehow liable if students start becoming ill while in student housing. Maybe kicking out the students isn't the "right" thing, but is a defensive posture to make sure that when people get sick, they do it off campus.
- danudey 7y ago
  > If you have a large population of mostly healthy young people who might carry the virus with few or no symptoms, is telling them all to leave and inevitably travel to other communities even wise? 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).
- smacktoward 7y ago
  I don't know about you, but I lived in dorms as a college student for four years, and in my experience they were an absolute breeding ground for illness. Waves of cold and flu would periodically rumble through them, and everybody you knew would just be sick for a couple of weeks. It was so common that you just got used to it. 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.
legohead 7y ago
Beyond the legal issue.. it doesn't seem like a smart move to spread people around more if you're worried about your students being infected.
- dailyrorschach 7y ago
  Leaving aside the merits/legality, I think the actual concern is students broadly traveling over the about to occur spring break, and then turning entire campuses into active outbreak clusters when everyone we returns within the incubation/transmission period.
- tzs 7y ago
  On-campus student housing tends to be high density. Bathrooms and showers and kitchens or kitchenettes are shared among many people. Meals are often in large communal dining rooms. 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.
theBobBob 7y ago
I realise that it's a completely different country (Ireland) but I remember back when I was in university and found out that most tenants in student accommodation aren't in fact tenants but rather are licencees. Basically means that most of them pesky tenant protections don't apply. It means that they could get away with so many things that landlords of actual tenants wouldn't.
- ianferrel 7y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know that such a categorization exists in US law. If you pay money to live somewhere for a short period, you generally fall under hotel regulations. If you pay money to live somewhere for a longer period, you're a tenant. Generally 30 days is the max for "short" period. There isn't a "sure, you live here, but you don't have rights" designation because historically such designations were abused.
throwaway_Bees 7y ago
Wow less than 24 hour notice to get your things and get out, with Spring Break starting Friday some students may not even be around and will return to a closed campus.
ng7j5d9 7y ago
I'm not sure that this is why students are rioting, but the University of Dayton men's basketball team is currently experiencing unprecedented success (ranked third nationally), and the "March Madness" NCAA men's basketball tournament starts in a couple of weeks. I wonder how much of this is truly about students having nowhere to go vs students being upset that they're going to miss out on a chance for wild partying. I also wonder if the administration erred on the side of caution here as a means to avoid dealing with over-exuberant partying.
- sushid 7y ago
  Students are being kicked out of their dorms and are upset/rioting due to this sudden eviction. Why on earth would your immediate suspicion be to accuse students of rioting because of missed potential parties?
  - ng7j5d9 7y ago
    Because I looked at the photos of the "riot": https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/photos-police-riot-gear-campus/UXJ3bJRbu3x3ayzQIYjDgJ/ https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/photos-police-rio... And the kids on the street generally look like entitled middle-class white kids causing a disturbance, which reminded me of my own days at the University of Dayton. EDIT: Perhaps they're being pressured by the administration but the Twitter account for the student newspaper says it was not a protest, and that "students were treating it as a potential last party of the semester". https://twitter.com/FlyerNews/status/1237758188943966213 https://twitter.com/FlyerNews/status/1237758188943966213
    - cultus 7y ago
      They all got kicked out of where they live, and paid to live. It's not entitlement to be upset about that. I think the main problem is that you are not making any attempt whatsoever to empathize, instead just bringing out knee-jerk canards about no-good lazy young people.
      - 7y ago
dv_dt 7y ago
I support the closure in general as a likely good action to help prevent the spread of Coronavirus, but have to criticize the implementation of the closure as moving too fast with no notice.
glitcher 7y ago
There is also a certain irony that closing down classes and housing as a way to avoid large groups of people gathering in the same places ended up being a trigger for the gathering of a large group of people to protest.
the-peter 7y ago
I am having a hard time understanding the benefit of taking thousands of students who have been mixing in close contact all month and mostly likely are already infected and forcing them to disperse to their various home towns across the country.
mech1234 7y ago
There's only 3 confirmed cases of the virus in Ohio. UD is being very proactive here.
ruffrey 7y ago
Title should indicate that "riot police were called" but not that the students rioted - it looks more like a demonstration and large crowd.
ecliptik 7y ago
I'm surprised when I did a search in comments that The Ghetto didn't show up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Dayton_Ghetto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Dayton_Ghetto UD student housing for upperclassmen are blocks of university owned houses next to campus. On the weekends the entire neighborhood becomes one big party. Larger, more boisterous gatherings for special events like Homecoming and St. Patrick's day have lead to "riot" like stories over the years. - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/university-of-dayton-st-patricks-day-riot_n_2900920 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/university-of-dayton-st-patri... - https://www.blackburnreview.com/2018/03/29/something-stinks-at-the-university-of-dayton/ https://www.blackburnreview.com/2018/03/29/something-stinks-... - https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10393&context=news_rls https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=103...

95 points by antdke 7y ago

I'm struggling to figure out how closing campus housing is legal. There's a huge chunk of student for whom that IS their housing. Full stop. They paid rent. They occupy the space. They have no other home to go to. This seems like illegal eviction to me.

nexuist 7y ago
I'm in university right now and our housing contract has a clause stating: "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.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  That clause seems like the kind of thing a judge would immediately throw out the window when it conflicts with tenancy laws.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    This is a state university for what it's worth. I doubt they haven't already run it by lawyers.
    - dayofthedaleks 7y ago
      U of Dayton is a private, catholic university.
      - kylebenzle 7y ago
        The guy you are replying to was talking about "his" school.
    - kamarg 7y ago
      Many contracts that have illegal/unenforceable clauses have been run by lawyers...
      - kwhitefoot 7y ago
        > Many contracts that have illegal/unenforceable clauses have been run by lawyers... Many contracts that have illegal/unenforceable clauses have them because they have been been run by lawyers. They know perfectly well that most ordinary people are in no position to tell whether or not a clause is enforceable. My landlady when I was at uni (74-77) tried it on me not realizing that my girlfriend was studying land law and contract law at the time.
  - anotherman554 7y ago
    Only if the tenancy laws don't have an exception for college dorms.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    That assumes that the judge isn't crooked. Judges are locally elected, and they may not wish to go against the largest employer/donor in town.
- bradstewart 7y ago
  Just because it says that, doesn't make it legal. I have no idea if it or isn't, but contracts can and do include illegal and/or unenforceable clauses.
rpiguy 7y ago
YES. 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...
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Universities are in a difficult position here. You're probably right that someone will sue them for breaking their housing agreement. On the other hand, if they didn't break the housing agreement, and students in the dorms started sickening (or worse, dying), you had better believe the lawsuits would start flying pretty quickly as well. So, if it's not a question of whether you're going to be sued but on what grounds, you want to do whatever thing will leave you in the best position to defend yourself when the inevitable lawsuits start arriving. And given the medical consensus that social distancing is necessary to protect against coronavirus, if I were a university administrator, I'd much rather be defending myself against charges that I broke a contract than against charges that I recklessly endangered peoples' lives in order to not have to break it.
  - d4mi3n 7y ago
    This is a very good point that deserves discussion. That said, this isn't an either-or situation. Universities could easily arrange temporary off-campus housing for students displaced by the crisis.
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      They could, but would such housing be appreciably better at protecting from coronavirus transmission than the dorms? They'd likely be just as densely populated, if not moreso. If the university buys a couple of buildings and moves the residents of five dorms into those buildings, they haven't made things better, they've made them worse. The reason to close the dorms isn't because the dorms themselves are bad in this scenario, it's that packing people closely together is bad in this scenario. The virtue of closing the dorms is that it sends most of the students back home, spreading them out among the general population. Density is the enemy.
danudey 7y ago
I love that the headline says the students "took to the streets" after they were kicked out of their homes onto the streets.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Where else did they expect them to 'take'? If I don't have any place to go besides my dorm, I likely don't have a car either.
smacktoward 7y ago
> There's a huge chunk of student for whom that IS their housing. Full stop. 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 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.
- Beldin 7y ago
  > One potential wrinkle here would be exactly what legal standard would be required for the coronavirus to qualify as a true force majeure ... for the institution. Getting kicked out of your house could easily be a force majeure for the tenant I'm curious how a force majeure clause applied to the current pandemic would help the institution more than its tenants.
  - kangnkodos 7y ago
    So if both parties are being relieved of their obligations, does that mean students get their money back for tuition, room and board? If you sign up for in person instructions, and then are told they are switching you to a YouTube video, you should be offered a choice to continue on the new terms or to terminate the agreement. If you are asked to leave your housing for part of the semester, you should be compensated for relocation expenses. If lightning struck one small campus dorm, the student would expect the university to immediately provide alternative housing or pay for a reasonable alternative and moving expenses. The same should hold if the whole campus was closed.
sneak 7y ago
Some places have banned gatherings, too, which, while good guidance to give out, I think might also be illegal. 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.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> I'm struggling to figure out how closing campus housing is legal. > 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?
- deckar01 7y ago
  > If you are approved for an extended stay or housing over spring break, you are permitted to stay. That statement is pretty vague though. At my university you had to apply to stay in the dorms during breaks and I think there was an additional fee involved. I'm sure most of the students were planning on leaving, but now they have 4 day gap between when they have to leave and when they were planning on leaving. At my university, I believe only students in the condo style units with personal entrances were allowed to stay by default. Navigating the bureaucracy of an institution like this can be difficult for a young person, especially one with a busy schedule and short notice.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    If on-campus housing is the only housing available to you, then either (most likely) you already have the approval, or (not at all likely) you're in the same crisis now that you would have been in in four days. Neither of those is really an exceptional hardship. "I need to shift my flight up four days" is not a difficulty to be described as "that IS their housing, full stop".
mschaef 7y ago
I worry about this aspect of it too. When I was in school, I was in easy driving distance (3 hours) of stable alternative housing at my parent's place. Not everybody has 'stable alternative housing', much less available to them without a huge logistical challenge. 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.)
h1srf 7y ago
As a former international student, even regular breaks when school would close the dorms were tough. Winter/Spring break especially. Back then there was no AirBnb and no one would do short term rentals. I do not envy those students with nowhere to go. Plane tickets while cheap-ish due to the outbreak may still be out of the reach of college students.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  UD has explicitly said international students can stay in their dorm rooms -- see https://udayton.edu/studev/health_wellness/healthcenter/coronavirus/index.php https://udayton.edu/studev/health_wellness/healthcenter/coro....
  - h1srf 7y ago
    Ah, missed that. I'm glad for them.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  There wasn't an international dorm at your University? My University had a dorm for international / special circumstances kids that never closed over breaks. I assumed that was normal.
  - h1srf 7y ago
    Nope. Small private school. I think as I was graduating they started operating some dorms full time.
tssva 7y ago
Ohio tenant laws specifically address the circumstances under which a student tenant can be evicted and this would violate them. However the governor has declared a state of emergency which does grant the executive branches powers they normally would not have. It may be within the power of the Ohio Department of Health under the state of emergency to force the university to take such an action. I don't know that it is but is would not be totally surprising if it was.

recursive 7y ago

https://twitter.com/univofdayton/status/1237517695081279488 https://twitter.com/univofdayton/status/1237517695081279488 > 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. Students should take any items necessary to continue their education from home as well as other essential items in case time away is extended. How are they so sure that students have any other home?

OJFord 7y ago
Presumably when they're not is exactly when those students 'are approved for an extended stay or housing over spring break'?
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Requiring approval will still inevitably leave some students homeless, especially when requesting it is likely to take longer than the eviction deadline.
  - strictnein 7y ago
    Better to just do nothing then, since the alternate isn't perfect.
    - crooked-v 7y ago
      There's a long way between 'perfect' and the current situation of 'horrible'. For example: giving more than 24 hours notice, and not doing it in the middle of spring break while many students aren't even physically there to get their stuff.

gumby 7y ago

MIT (and I imagine other schools) say that if you can't leave (specifically calling out as examples visa issues, not having another home, or having a home where you could not safely go) that you don't have to move out. Not sure why this school would not make the same allowance.

nathanaldensr 7y ago

I guess a "riot" is defined as "young students milling around recording with their cellphones."

pulisse 7y ago
According to TFA: > Officers in riot gear attended the scene and shot pepper balls at students
- a3n 7y ago
  So, the police rioted.
  - 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
    I guess it's time for news outlets to dust off the old reliable "the protest turned violent".
_cairn 7y ago
Yes, but clickbait.
grecy 7y ago
Yes, when you peacefully gather in 2020 to express your disapproval of something, the police will show up in riot gear and shoot you with pepper balls. Welcome to the future, citizen.
dillondoyle 7y ago
Also the local news - and a lot of twitter videos - make it look like a party. Beer and everything. Like the opposite of 'limit crowd contact' adding in a ton of germs from drunk college partiers. https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/police-responding-report-large-crowd-campus/iitOG3z311QvsCFzdq4CrI/ https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/police-responding...

abeppu 7y ago

Aside from the significant question of whether you can just kick people out of the place they paid to live with no notice, is it a good idea from a public health perspective? If you have a large population of mostly healthy young people who might carry the virus with few or no symptoms, is telling them all to leave and inevitably travel to other communities even wise? My uninformed, cynical fear is that these moves are based on someone in the school administration worrying that the school will be somehow liable if students start becoming ill while in student housing. Maybe kicking out the students isn't the "right" thing, but is a defensive posture to make sure that when people get sick, they do it off campus.

danudey 7y ago
> If you have a large population of mostly healthy young people who might carry the virus with few or no symptoms, is telling them all to leave and inevitably travel to other communities even wise? 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).
smacktoward 7y ago
I don't know about you, but I lived in dorms as a college student for four years, and in my experience they were an absolute breeding ground for illness. Waves of cold and flu would periodically rumble through them, and everybody you knew would just be sick for a couple of weeks. It was so common that you just got used to it. 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.

legohead 7y ago

Beyond the legal issue.. it doesn't seem like a smart move to spread people around more if you're worried about your students being infected.

dailyrorschach 7y ago
Leaving aside the merits/legality, I think the actual concern is students broadly traveling over the about to occur spring break, and then turning entire campuses into active outbreak clusters when everyone we returns within the incubation/transmission period.
tzs 7y ago
On-campus student housing tends to be high density. Bathrooms and showers and kitchens or kitchenettes are shared among many people. Meals are often in large communal dining rooms. 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.

theBobBob 7y ago

I realise that it's a completely different country (Ireland) but I remember back when I was in university and found out that most tenants in student accommodation aren't in fact tenants but rather are licencees. Basically means that most of them pesky tenant protections don't apply. It means that they could get away with so many things that landlords of actual tenants wouldn't.

ianferrel 7y ago
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know that such a categorization exists in US law. If you pay money to live somewhere for a short period, you generally fall under hotel regulations. If you pay money to live somewhere for a longer period, you're a tenant. Generally 30 days is the max for "short" period. There isn't a "sure, you live here, but you don't have rights" designation because historically such designations were abused.

throwaway_Bees 7y ago

Wow less than 24 hour notice to get your things and get out, with Spring Break starting Friday some students may not even be around and will return to a closed campus.

ng7j5d9 7y ago

I'm not sure that this is why students are rioting, but the University of Dayton men's basketball team is currently experiencing unprecedented success (ranked third nationally), and the "March Madness" NCAA men's basketball tournament starts in a couple of weeks. I wonder how much of this is truly about students having nowhere to go vs students being upset that they're going to miss out on a chance for wild partying. I also wonder if the administration erred on the side of caution here as a means to avoid dealing with over-exuberant partying.

sushid 7y ago
Students are being kicked out of their dorms and are upset/rioting due to this sudden eviction. Why on earth would your immediate suspicion be to accuse students of rioting because of missed potential parties?
- ng7j5d9 7y ago
  Because I looked at the photos of the "riot": https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/photos-police-riot-gear-campus/UXJ3bJRbu3x3ayzQIYjDgJ/ https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/photos-police-rio... And the kids on the street generally look like entitled middle-class white kids causing a disturbance, which reminded me of my own days at the University of Dayton. EDIT: Perhaps they're being pressured by the administration but the Twitter account for the student newspaper says it was not a protest, and that "students were treating it as a potential last party of the semester". https://twitter.com/FlyerNews/status/1237758188943966213 https://twitter.com/FlyerNews/status/1237758188943966213
  - cultus 7y ago
    They all got kicked out of where they live, and paid to live. It's not entitlement to be upset about that. I think the main problem is that you are not making any attempt whatsoever to empathize, instead just bringing out knee-jerk canards about no-good lazy young people.
    - 7y ago

dv_dt 7y ago

I support the closure in general as a likely good action to help prevent the spread of Coronavirus, but have to criticize the implementation of the closure as moving too fast with no notice.

glitcher 7y ago

There is also a certain irony that closing down classes and housing as a way to avoid large groups of people gathering in the same places ended up being a trigger for the gathering of a large group of people to protest.

the-peter 7y ago

I am having a hard time understanding the benefit of taking thousands of students who have been mixing in close contact all month and mostly likely are already infected and forcing them to disperse to their various home towns across the country.

mech1234 7y ago

There's only 3 confirmed cases of the virus in Ohio. UD is being very proactive here.

ruffrey 7y ago

Title should indicate that "riot police were called" but not that the students rioted - it looks more like a demonstration and large crowd.

ecliptik 7y ago

I'm surprised when I did a search in comments that The Ghetto didn't show up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Dayton_Ghetto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Dayton_Ghetto UD student housing for upperclassmen are blocks of university owned houses next to campus. On the weekends the entire neighborhood becomes one big party. Larger, more boisterous gatherings for special events like Homecoming and St. Patrick's day have lead to "riot" like stories over the years. - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/university-of-dayton-st-patricks-day-riot_n_2900920 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/university-of-dayton-st-patri... - https://www.blackburnreview.com/2018/03/29/something-stinks-at-the-university-of-dayton/ https://www.blackburnreview.com/2018/03/29/something-stinks-... - https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10393&context=news_rls https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=103...