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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

The students have agreed to follow certain rules related to Covid. Why is it shocking that the university is evaluating whether they are following the rules and doing some enforcement?

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To provide a little more context...

Students faced a ternary choice prior to the Fall semester: 1. enroll as an on-campus (and thus live in a dorm), or 2. enroll as a remote student (and thus live at home), or 3. take a leave of absence (and thus live wherever)

Only students in that second bin were subject to the requirement stay out of Providence. A cynical take on this is that Brown has always had strict residency requirements for its students, and residency fees are far above the market rate in Providence. If students could simply mark themselves as "remote" to get out of paying dorm fees, I'm sure many would.

The other key bit of context is just how poor of a job Brown did at geolocating students. Dozens of students (some international!) received baseless notices of reprimand. The most compelling theory I've seen is that these students were using Brown's VPN, and were identified as on campus via IP geolocation.

Thanks for the context! Could you please explain to me as a European what's wrong with a student commuting to the university (if we put COVID aside, of course)? In Europe, university accommodation is usually below the market rate and is hard to get and many students end up subletting a room in a regular apartment.

(Again, this is a rather cynical take, but...)

Brown's monopoly on undergraduate housing is an essential source of revenue. Brown generates twice the $/ft² in revenue as private landlords in the area, but pays only a fraction of their running costs (Brown pays no income tax on this revenue, nor property tax on its dorms). There's nothing wrong with students commuting, per se, but for a University that's come to rely on residency fees, ditching the residency requirement is no easy financial feat.

I have no idea what Brown's policy is but a lot of 4 year universities have requirements that out of town first year students live in the dormitory rather than renting an apartment. It you were already living in town then you are normally exempt. It sounds like Brown is a lot stricter than that though?

Covid is the whole point. They don't want students to sign up for the remote option and then interact with the on campus students.

It's not a US vs. Europe thing. I went to a school in the US where the vast majority of students commute. I think at the time, it was something like 700 people living on-campus vs. 30,000 living off-campus.

Whoa there is a Brown VPN service?! I didn't see that mentioned in the article, but certainly could explain some of the issues.

For some more context: you cannot usually read scientific papers without a university IP, hence you need to connect via VPN if even briefly to download PDFs from Elsevier etc. unless you want to go the scihub route.

Many publishers explicitly forbid VPN accesses or proxies. So it is more probably just accessing lecture resources.

Interesting. I've never had any trouble VPNing in for journal articles (in the UK) though there are a few specialised resources (normally expensive databases) which can only be accessed from the library itself.

Mind you, Oxford is sparing as to who gets VPN access, so it doesn't open a hole for non-members of the university to get access to the serial's collection.

I'd be surprised if most universities did not offer a VPN service. I know mine does so that you can access resources only available on the intranet (like course websites) while being off-campus.

Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that they're not trying to profit from their real estate side business and are instead legitimately interested in slowing the spread of COVID-19? They probably did some risk analysis and that guided how many on-campus students they could accept. They then accepted that many students. If other students show up on campus after agreeing not to, then their risk assessment is wrong, and the entire program is jeopardized.

The language in the letter triggers my "the lawyers are panicking" detector more than my "you're screwing us out of a few bucks" detector.

> Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that they're not trying to profit from their real estate side business and are instead legitimately interested in slowing the spread of COVID-19

No, if this is what they truly cared about, there wouldn’t be 3 different choices for students. All would be required to stay remote with special exemptions for those who don’t have a safe home otherwise.

That's the zero risk approach, but you can have a risk tolerance above zero.

And that tolerance is represented by how loose you make those exemptions.

I think the fine print about being around Providence is what probably tripped some students up. I am also betting that a few students had their plans change and didn't quite update their registration.

That all being said, I think threatening suspension is a bit too harsh for what is probably a simple mistake for a bunch of 17-22 y/os

"Agreed" is a bit unfair. Transferring schools is a huge ordeal and can mean losing scholarships, credits not transferring, and graduating late. Except for the freshmen who enrolled after those rules were already in place, the rest of the students agreed under duress.

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