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.
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.
... 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.
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.
But what if all dorms everywhere are struck by lightning? All at the same time? Is it still reasonable to expect the university to be able to conjure up alternative housing in the near term then?
Scale matters.
The whole reason force majeure exists as a concept is because sometimes really big, bad things happen, and when they do, it can be unreasonable to expect people to be able to do things they are able to do in normal times without breaking a sweat.
Uninhabitable apartments have a lot of relevant case law for things like fires.
In such cases universities could pay for hotel rooms while setting up long term accommodation. The specifics get tricky, but generally it’s on them to hold up their end of a contract. The ultimate escape clause is bankruptcy, not just being expensive.
"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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
We could:
1. Find alternative housing for some fraction of the students to lower the population density within the dorms--sending 1/3 of students elsewhere reduces population density to ~65% of what it would have been before
2. Retrofit current housing to help minimize spread of disease
3. Allow students to opt-in to remaining at the dorms with agreement to adhere to much stricter health and sanitation standards
4. Allow students to remain with the understanding that they will be quarantined until such a time that they can call be tested
None of these are great ideas, I'm sure, but I can't imagine any of them being worse than the current situation we see these students in.
Honestly, what percentage of staff and students do you think would be post retirement age? https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
AGE DEATH RATE(c)DEATH RATE(a)
80+ 21.9% 14.8%
70-79 - 8.0%
60-69 - 3.6%
50-59 - 1.3%
40-49 - 0.4%
30-39 - 0.2%
20-29 - 0.2%
10-19 - 0.2%
0-9 no fatalities
Do you have a source for that?
IANAL, but I would think that would only apply if they were forcing students to stay, not leave.
Now what? Sending the rest of the kids home would be irresponsible, you're spreading the disease. Students in dorms can't isolate or quarantine.
> 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?
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.
"I need to shift my flight up four days" is not a difficulty to be described as "that IS their housing, full stop".
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.