They should just program an extra week of "shit happens" into their budget, and if they don't need the extra days, call it a windfall.

in order to be accredited? For instance, when a course is said to give 3 hours worth of credit, does a school promise to provide a certain number of hours worth of classroom time in order to fulfill the requirements of their accreditation for that course? If that is the case, I could see why they would want to make sure they stay on schedule, otherwise they would have to make up a certain amount of days at the end of the semester and that could get very complicated.

That's not to say that universities don't sometimes stay open when they should close, and I can't speak to the specifics of the situation in Kansas.

The schools I've been associated with have certainly been hesitant to cancel classes, but during inclement weather that didn't result in closure have alerted the community to the situation, counseled caution/judgment in deciding whether to attend class, and urged leniency for those not able to attend.

and demonstrators and so on. A lot of it should be taught in a certain order. Say "we're pausing for 2 days", and suddenly everything that was happening on a Tuesday happens on a Thursday, for the next 5 weeks or something - which screws up everyone's plans with life outside the university.

Closed, except for the hospital, or course.

I canceled my classes. No student's life is worth what I was talking about that day, nor is my own.

They closed Monday, but we did have a foot of snow.

Just a guess. .

They have schedules for conducting experiments and/or for handing in reports.

And sometimes you just can't leave a machine unsupervised for more than half a day.

If something goes wrong, a day lost can mean a week lost or worse.
(One Friday afternoon, a colleague of mine went home, with the incubator still running. She had been feeding and catering the bacteria all week and needed them after the weekend for an experiment. Somebody else came in after her and switched off the incubator because it was running unsupervised or wasting electricity or whatever. When my colleague returned on Monday, the bacterias were dead and her whole measurement-plan was thrown into disarray.)

So everyone still had to work. The only thing I can figure is that it must relate to funding.

They refused to close between terms when even the grocery stores shut down. It doesn't have to do with classes or students. There is another reason.