Well, you really do need to figure out a solution for everyone on campus. During the day almost every classroom and lecture hall is occupied by some sort of class or meeting, so the needs of these relatively small groups would inevitably come into conflict. Our intro CS courses also easily number over a thousand students, and while most don't come in person to lectures and are instead encouraged to watch the recorded version online, recording equipment would also be unavailable without power.

Not to mention that a majority of classrooms on campus would be rendered unusable by the lack of lighting (the largest lecture halls have no windows or natural light to speak of) and ventilation.

You do have to figure out a solution for 40k people though, because if just one of those relatively small group of people does something that hurts someone, then now the school is liable since it didn’t give proper instructions/protocol/training, and enter the lawyers.

It’s much cheaper to just shut it down. That is the state of US society. If you’re a leader, first, you think about how you open yourself up to being sued, then you make sure you have plausible deniability (I warned them, told them not to, they acknowledged, it was contracted out to XYZ entity, etc), then you proceed with solving the problem.