unless your in New York. They are the size of small dogs

True, still unlikely that they will actually hurt you though.

As someone with the rat profile picture, I have to disagree. :)

No, they come up after at least spiders, bedbugs and cockroaches.

That's actually untrue. The vast majority of diseases which rats carry (most rats don't carry disease in the first place) cannot be transmitted to humans, and even the ones which can are normally harmless.

Bubonic plague, Lyme's disease, Lymphocytic Choriomenigitis (LCMV), Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, Leprospirosis, Rat-bite fever, salmonellosis, and the list goes on. If it were just rats, it wouldn't be as long, but these aren't pets, meaning they're carrying fleas, ticks, lice, and other parasites. And that something is killing them, because they're dying in the (relative) open. I don't have any problem with rats that are breed and raised for animal companion purposes, but anyone that has the barest knowledge of contagions, knows that dead animals, especially scavenger animals, means trouble. It's one of the first things that people looking the cause or start of a pandemic look for. Add in that decaying corpses have their own strain of illnesses and health hazards associated with them and a campus having this bad of a problem is NOT safe.

Actually, the rats which caused the bubonic plague (black rats) are not often found near humans anymore as they were overrun by brown rats whom are immune to the plague and therefore stopped the fleas from spreading it anymore. Also, rats' bodies are not always where the rat actually died. Rats within the mischief likely moved the body away from their nest so it doesn't attract predators or decay and cause illness. Obviously this isn't a good thing for the campus to have, and they should solve the infestation.

Rats do still carry fleas that have the bubonic plague, they are simply less common- their have been outbreaks across the USA alone within the last decade, locations including New York City and various locations across the US Southwest. While it's black rats that are the carriers, and they are less common, they are by no means extinct or excluded from urban environments. While the bodies might have been moved, it's also possible that they weren't, especially as OP saw live rats nearby the corpses. In which case, the dead may be beginning to outpace the healthy individuals, and there could very well be bodies stuffed into the walls (while I don't think healthy colonies do so, there have been cases where building that were in use that had walls literally stuffed with dead rats because the colony/mischief is far over capacity) which, decaying bodies of any kind are a biohazard. It does still need handled, not just to limit possible safety concerns, but also so the colony can perhaps be relocated as opposed to exterminated.

The rat could have eaten some poison an just happened to die in plain sight my parents had one die under the guest bed

#17 you clearly don't know too much about rats if you really think they're dying from poisonous food, assuming no one's doing anything to exterminate them.

OP didn't say that they saw live rats near dead ones. They said that they'd seen live ones, as well as dead ones. There's nothing in that to suggest that they were close to each other. Fall all we know, they saw the live ones on one side of the campus and the dead ones on the other side. So, assuming that, it's more lilely that the dead rats were moved. Rats (wild ones) are very unlikely to transmit any disease to humans. Mainly because they won't get close enough. They'd rather flee than attempt to attack a larger predator. You're more likely to get attacked by a pet dog than a wild rat.

You should be able to email the page/post to yourself by using the share function, if you are using a mobile app. If you use a browser on a computer, you should be able to then add it to your bookmarks.

Thank you! I'm using the mobile app, so will do the email thing!

You're welcome.