In the face of fees must fall protect - Who covers the costs when the protestors fall?
John Stebbing, Camargue Director: General Liability.
Any young student in his right mind would agree that deciphering Heisenberg's uncertainty principle on a sunny afternoon just doesn’t make sense. Quantum mechanics is challenging at the best of times, but on sunny afternoons it’s worse. Sunny afternoons ought never to be spent in the gloomy confines of a library or study. They ought to be spent outside where the bees are buzzing and the birds are singing. On some recent sunny afternoons the birds were not only singing, they were also dancing; like bees dancing to communicate with the hive, so too, these birds were dancing to communicate with the collective.
There are so many things in life which are meant to be shared. Mass protests being one of those things. With the noblest of intentions, students from all over, whether skinny or not, have been throwing their mass behind the mass protests.
This brings us to an important question about liability insurance: what happens when a protestor throws his toys and hurts an innocent civilian? In the court of public opinion it is often the party with the deepest pockets who is guiltiest. The university could for that reason find itself being blamed for all sorts of “wrongdoing”. Would the university’s general liability policy cover such a claim?
Almost all liability policies state that terrorism, war and civil unrest are excluded from the policy’s cover. At times the exclusion may seem odd, since these are all very deliberate acts and the policy, specifically excludes deliberate wrongdoing. However, the recent unrest at South African universities across the country demonstrates why such an exclusion is still relevant. A university may somehow be seen to be provoking civil unrest, by increasing student fees as a pertinent example. The university might be blamed for the ensuing protests (including any violence) and those who suffered losses could in turn sue the university for their loss. To express the exclusion in student speak: “This is like, so totally not covered.”
Finally, this brings us to distance-education students. One might stop to ponder for a moment what those mass protests might look like. An image comes to mind of many isolated, lonely souls, each sitting in front of keyboard typing angry emails to the university administration. For those students with laptops this could presumably be done while also dancing.
The reality is that there are a limited number of emails to which the university can respond. If the emails were to come in faster and faster, at some point the university’s administration would stop coping with their workload. Now, imagine if generating vast quantities of emails were somehow automated by the use of a software programme. A human on the other side might not be able to push the ‘delete’ button fast enough to keep up. Even if they did, they would get little else done. This is what is known as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
Add to this the fact that an innovative hacker may be able to break into other people’s computers and manipulate them so that they to join in the DoS attack. This is known as a Distributed DoS (DDoS) attack: the university might argue that people ought to keep their computers properly secured so that they don’t get used to abuse others. If the university went a step further and sued those people for allowing their computers to participate in the attack, then that may be covered under a cyber-risks policy.
The bottom line is, prevention is better than cure and risks managed and mitigated is better than the alternative.
