Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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), 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> All dorms where stuck by lightning.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com