Court-filing photos show mold in dorm rooms. Students are suing Indiana U. after dealing with mold in residence halls across campus. Images Obtained via Court Documents
A new filing in a lawsuit alleges that Indiana University at Bloomington pressured its health center to play down the likelihood that student illnesses had been caused by dorm-room mold. The university denies the allegation.
The memo was filed in Monroe County Circuit Court in support of class-action certification for a suit begun in October 2018. It came in the wake of a University of Maryland at College Park student’s death following delayed notification by the university about adenovirus related to mold problems there. Colleges in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have also been experiencing mold crises in what experts say is a trend often resulting from deferred maintenance, campus expansions, and extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.
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Court-filing photos show mold in dorm rooms. Students are suing Indiana U. after dealing with mold in residence halls across campus. Images Obtained via Court Documents
A new filing in a lawsuit alleges that Indiana University at Bloomington pressured its health center to play down the likelihood that student illnesses had been caused by dorm-room mold. The university denies the allegation.
The memo was filed in Monroe County Circuit Court in support of class-action certification for a suit begun in October 2018. It came in the wake of a University of Maryland at College Park student’s death following delayed notification by the university about adenovirus related to mold problems there. Colleges in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have also been experiencing mold crises in what experts say is a trend often resulting from deferred maintenance, campus expansions, and extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.
The memo, filed by three Indianapolis law firms on behalf of 22 student plaintiffs, says that Indiana University “apparently sought to influence the medical advice and perhaps even the medical treatment that university physicians provided to students who presented with mold-related conditions at the University Health Center, and actually encouraged university doctors not to inform students that their ailments may be caused by mold in their dorm rooms.”
The university denies that it ever pressured health-services personnel to play down the possibility of mold-related illness or its severity.
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The plaintiffs’ memo says Andrea Cailles, director of residence life, suggested to Beth Conrad Rupp, medical director of the health center, that health providers consider possible alternative causes to ailments that might be caused by mold because “students and community members that are new to this region of the country struggle with respiratory illness and allergies that come part and parcel with moving to southern Indiana.”
The memo quotes an email from Pete Grogg, executive director of the health center, to M. Davis (Dave) O’Guinn, vice provost for student affairs and dean of students, that says Patrick Connor, executive director of residential programs and services, “admits that there is mold in some of the residence halls” and “has asked that we stop saying to patients” that symptoms “may be triggered by that very same mold.”
The plaintiffs accuse the university of not acting to sufficiently remediate its dorms’ air systems despite knowing of significant problems as early as 2005. Worse, they say, a report from that year cites “an additional incentive … for delayed renovation and repair investments, since expenses related to decreased student health do not accrue to any academic or nonacademic unit.” “In other words,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers write, the university “recognized that it was economically advantageous” for it “to allow students to bear the costs of mold-related illnesses rather than for the university to bear the expense of repairing the moldy dorms.”
The resulting crisis this year exposed students in three dorms to danger, the lawyers argue. They point to a three- to fourfold spike in residents of those dorms who sought treatment for mold-related illnesses in 2018 versus 2015. The situation displaced more than 260 of them “to live and sleep in common areas in other dorms,” resulting in overcrowding in those spaces. Elsewhere, the university required students to run hot, noisy air purifiers on high 24 hours a day. The filters, designed for larger areas, took up space and kept students awake at night.
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Mold or Sleep?
“I can’t sleep with it on because it’s too loud,” said one resident. “I, like any other student, need to get decent sleep to do well in my classes, so I turn it off. I shouldn’t have to choose between sleeping and having mold spores floating around my room.” A university environmental manager, Dan Derheimer, according to the memo, said he wouldn’t work in his office if one of the filter machines were there because “it’s too noisy.”
Inspectors found mold in 698 rooms campuswide, attributed to poor maintenance of decayed insulation around water pipes in air systems. The memo quotes one university facilities manager as saying, “These mold situations didn’t happen overnight.”
The university has acknowledged how disruptive the remediation process has been, and gave residents of two of the worst-affected dorms a $3,000 credit each. That didn’t mollify parents, one of whom wrote: “My daughter’s health is at risk, and IU just tries to put a Band-Aid on the situation.” An internal university email quoted in the plaintiffs’ memo nods to the perceived inadequacy of the gesture. In response to suits filed, it says “the $3,000 was probably too quick and most likely done with thought that if we give some money and acknowledge the issue, it would calm folks down, which it did not.”
The suit also alleges that Indiana University has sought to soft-pedal the crisis, “repeatedly stating to the public that it was not an ongoing concern, and instead was caused by a brief period of high humidity.”
The university on Thursday issued a statement in response to the latest accusations in the suit:
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“At no time did Indiana University officials pressure the medical professionals at the IU Student Health Center to downplay the health impacts of mold exposure. In fact, the director of the health center primarily identified the health problems associated with exposure so that IU Health staff could best treat students. Any student who identified any illness that could possibly be linked to mold exposure received free medical care at the health center and reimbursement for medical care elsewhere.”
IU’s Response
The university says it moved the renovations of two dorms up by a year. Half of a third dorm was renovated last year, and the other half was already scheduled to be renovated this summer. In the renovated buildings, full heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems will replace individual room units that have pipes exposed to humidity, especially when windows are open.
With 2,400 beds offline in the coming year, the university has contracted with three apartment complexes to house displaced students. A new dorm has been delayed because construction bids came in high, the university says, but should be built within a couple of years.
The university says it has paid students $7.5 million so far in medical care on the campus and in reimbursement for doctors’ visits outside the university system, as well as for damaged personal property. It has set up stations to clean laptops affected by the mold, and provided free laundry services.
Peter F. Lake directs the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy, at Stetson University. While not able to comment on the Indiana situation specifically, he said that dorm mold is an increasing concern nationally. Big donors to colleges like to see their names on buildings but don’t like their money earmarked for matters as unglamorous as building maintenance and renovation.
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Colleges might be able to offer narrow legal defenses in some cases, based on state statutes from decades ago, during rapid growth in affordable-housing projects. At that time, colleges received some liability exemptions. Indiana has cited such an exemption in its response to one aspect of the current suit.
But, said Lake, the court of public opinion may prove more important to colleges than state courts in the long run. “Nationally,” he said, “the trend in student housing is to shoot well above minimal habitability.” When colleges compete for ever-more-demanding consumers, residences are increasingly held to the standards of the hospitality industry.
He warns colleges to keep their eye on the big picture: “What is a legal argument today could be a political argument tomorrow and a business issue the next day.”