Please look at the damn nameplate

The local fishwrap -- one of the two that have "Detroit" in the nameplate, should you be scoring along at home -- covers the impact of the coronavirus on your major institutions of higher learning. There's your Michigan State in the lede, your U of M in the second graf, and, if you hang on for the eighth, EMU (in Ypsi).

Where's Detroit? Interesting question, given that one of the state's RU/VH universities (the old Carnegie R1 classification) is right there in midtown, a couple blocks -- actually cattycorner, if you count the Grad School offices -- from the art museum whose support is on the local ballot today. We're still a fairly commuter-heavy campus, but a big university is more than students (or people peering into microscopes, or people teaching large lecture classes), even if there are 27,000 or so of them. It's also people who open the buildings and clean the offices and staff the libraries -- kind of a hit on commuting, food service, day care, and all sorts of other stuff that goes on in big cities as well as quaint college towns, should there be a major change. One might think it worth the attention of the (ahem) local newspaper.

The issue seems to come up whenever there's a big snowfall: the press pays attention to the schools with big football stadiums and lots of graduates in the legislature, but the ones within the city limits can sit there and wait for alerts on their phones and the next round of traffic and weather on the eights. Social responsibility is an oddly distributed characteristic.