Edit--This was a split topic.

Well maybe they should have quickly and efficiently gotten the official word out and told their employees what the heck was going on, before there was a need to bring people on campus. If they meant to close campus they should have CLOSED campus...if it's not safe for the students, it's not safe for the professors or the Chancellor or the bookstore employees.

And they shouldn't have danced around the subject of cancelling classes...and they DEFINITELY shouldn't have informed people that all-day classes were cancelled (10:30) AFTER their previous deadline (10:00) had expired.

That's why faculty won't have a problem fighting it in court. All they have to do is point out the stupidity of the administration. There's a high probability of a bomb or chemical weapon, the state police, FBI, and military are suited up ready for war. How &^%$#*& stupid do you have to be to consider having class when even CNN is telling you it's a bad idea? Now if the administration showed that they told professor X that classes were cancelled and that professor said students should come anyway, that's a different story.

Does anyone have anything to back this up? What would the university gain from taking legal action against employees?

This is hearsay on my part, but I was wondering if anyone else had heard about anything like this. I thought it was clear a long time ago that we had a set of toolbag faculty... And, I don't think it would be right for me to mention one of the professors I heard this about was a certain Chem X prof. Where X is the lowest prime number greater than 2.... So I won't.

to be fair - the administration did give us the impression that classes would be resuming at 10:30. Pericles did say that unless there were further cancellations he expected us to be there. Yes I think its stupid to try and hold class if theres only 15 minutes of it (Chem 3: 9:30-10:45), but I don't think that he did anything wrong.

If anyone is to blame here, its the toolbag administration for not just sucking it up and postponing classes before their deadline was up. Or incase they did this, its the toolbag IT's fault for not posting it to the UMR homepage quickly enough. (i checked it at 10:20, no cancelation. My roommate checked at 10:35 when i called him because G3 was empty and asked if the webpage had been updated - it hadn't)

IT doesn't update the main UMR page. I don't know exactly which department it is, but I can guarantee you it's not IT.

based on that, the good experience i've had with IT, and the idiocy of the administration, i'd lean towards the real toolbags being the same ones who advocate that a rose by any other name does NOT smell as sweet

(incase some retard doesn't get that i mean the administration. they want to change the name)

1 professor != administration
Classes resume @ 10:30 != classes starting that normally start before 10:30
Administration != determiners of deadlines during crisis situations
Web browsers have caches
You = n00b

I agree that, whoever it was, really needed to get on the ball and let the students know way before CNN or the local news started saying that classes were cancelled all day. Someone with authority had to have told them, what the hell were they doing not telling us, OFFICIALLY (because we know the news can get stuff wrong and those of us with tests didn't want to miss them on account of faulty info) first??? Some of these people need to stop being such tightasses when it comes to calling off school (10:00 to 10:30, WHAT?) and realize that when we have a freaking WMD team on campus and ~20 people in quarantine, MAYBE they should give in and cancel class.

Is there like an award for being the university with the least days off or something? That's how these people are acting.

Then why not say 10:45 on Tues/Thurs? When did the web page update? It would AT LEAST have been after I would have left for class (I was hitting ctrl+F5)..... So it it would have said classes resume at 9:35, would you take that to mean the 9:30 classes are completely canceled?



Particularly if you recognize that virtually ZERO classes start between 10-10:30 on Tuesday, and according to Kelvron, that means NOTHING WAS CHANGED (at least not for the VAST majority of campus)....

Yes. I can't imagine the logic it would take to conclude that if classes resumed at 10:30am, that you should show up to your 10am class. You've already missed part of the class, it makes no sense to try and go to the rest of it.

We can bitch about the administration doing this, and the administration doing that, but in this kind of situation, it's no longer up to the administration. The person who was running everything was not the administration, but a member of law enforcement (chief of police, head of the WMD squad, whoever). As such,
1) They may not know how the university is normally run, so their deadlines and such may make no sense to us. You can't assume that they know something by proximity.
2) Their primary concern isn't "we should tell the students that classes are canceled", it's more "let's make sure that people don't get hurt". The person is running a crisis situation. Yes, it turned out to be nothing, but the process to get to that point is still the same. As such, if you cross the police line when the cops tell you to stay away, you can and will get arrested, fined, jailed, whatever. And there's not a thing you can do about it.

The cops are calling the shots for this, not the administration. The administration is only the intermediary.

Even then, what made them think a half-hour extension was practical?

Or that they didn't update the classes canceled for all day until 10:40 (and no, I wasn't pwned by my web browser's cache, that's why God created Ctrl+F5).

i dunno, i'm not a cop, nor am I an administrator, nor am I psychic. There's so many possible explainations, some nonsense, some that kinda make sense, but I don't want to try and guess at the internal reasoning of people I never met, especially because I don't even know who was calling the shots. I don't mind taking a stab at correcting the process though (i.e. which group was calling the shots), that's a little easier to figure out.
Regardless, it's something that's already happened, and didn't have a major effect on most people (an inconvienence to most unless you tried to break the rules). No use bitching about it even more unless they make the same mistake again.

My classes actually do shit (most of them at least), so missing 1 hour is better to than missing 1 hour and 15 minutes. Normally I feel you make a pretty good point (even if it counters mine) but this time I have to say I am pretty sure you are talking out your ass. IF the administration were not calling the shots, the administration would not be able to file charges for disobeying administration (if they are indeed filing charges), and how better to not get people hurt, than to not allow them in the area ie cancel classes? And, check you in box, the only thing I have done is bold the relevant portion.

EDIT:: They are making a far more grievous mistake if they are indeed trying to sue a prof, for trying to hold class during his alloted class time. No need to stick your head up the administrations ass, and pretend they are infallible.