Models of viruses are seen during President Donald J. Trump’s tour of the viral pathogenesis laboratory Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

We’ve seen a lot of good and bad responses in the face of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

We’ve seen funny things like Ryan Reynolds cracking on celebrities and Weird Al Yankovic teaching us about germs. Steve Martin giving us some joy with a little banjo balm. John Krasinski offering up “some good news.”

But there are also just some downright weird responses.

Hundreds of students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts were up a creek without a paddle when the classes they paid for were shut down because of the pandemic. Some didn’t think trying to do it remotely would work. So naturally, they inquired of the school and their Dean, Allyson Green, if they might be able to get some of their money back.

The students outlay $58,000 a year in tuition so one can understand they may want what they paid for, the value for the money.

From NY Post:

“Aggrieved students argue that remote classes cannot possibly serve as an adequate replacement for classes that necessitate a physical presence in the room (like acting classes, or dance classes, or film projects, or etcetera),” the post reads.

School dean Allyson Green emailed the student body on March 18, saying that they would not be getting a tuition refund, and later sent another email on the matter in which she attached a video showing her dancing and singing to “Losing My Religion” in a living room, students said.

Perhaps the strangest streamed performance of this strange time is the NYU dean who refused to consider a student petition for tuition rebates after the shutdown—but did an interpretive dance for them instead. pic.twitter.com/64kB0wwErH

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) March 29, 2020

So she couldn’t even give them the courtesy of a proper response but flipped them off with an interpretive dance.

Needless to say, the students didn’t think it a particularly appropriate response to their request and it’s hard not to agree with them.

“We here at NYU Local would just like to say: what the f–k is this,” the post on the blog read. “We get it. You’re stressed. It’s a stressful time. People are mad, a lot of them at you. But what the f–k are you doing???”

The blog post titled, “An Open Letter to Tisch Dean Allyson Green: Please Stop,” goes on to say that the video is “uncomfortable to watch.”

Green claimed the response was part of who she was a performer.

“The focus of my career as a performer, choereographer, and dance educator, and my most authentic mode of expression, has always been dance,” Green said. “In the video, I shared the song with which I have welcomed first-year students to the Tisch School of the Arts for the past eight years. It is a piece that — as I explained…speaks to frustration and disappointment, and that helped see me through the loss of 30 friends to AIDS — another difficult period for artists.”

Green continued: “What I meant to demonstrate is my certainty that even with the unprecedented hardships of social distancing and remotely-held classes, it is still possible for the Tisch community to make art together, and that all the artists in our school will find ways to remain closely connected even as circumstances challenge us.

“I regret it if my email left the reasons for my dancing misunderstood — although I will note that I have also received many positive acknowledgments — but its intent was surely neither frivolous or disrespectful,” the dean said.

Call that clueless, but perhaps that’s typical of a lot of academia. She likely doesn’t have to worry about her pay, so she really doesn’t get it, because her response isn’t about the students it’s all about her and her feelings. How many times does she say I or my in that statement? It’s like a Barack Obama narcissist statement.

Chances the students get their money back from a school with a dean like that? Guessing not good.