Have you tried finding allies in the faculty on this issue? I strongly reccomend you find a handful who share your concerns and leverage them to get this madness resolved.
Sharing desks is hard, I'm curious if they are trying to use COVID WFH policy to justify over-accepting students, hoping the schedules just magically work out. Fun fact, they wont. No amount of metrics will stop two people wanting the same desk at the same time, if allowed. Or am I mistaken? Why else would monitoring desk usage be on the table (excuse the pun)? Surely they aren't trying to use these figures in evaluating a students work, right?
I think it's pretty sad that Northeastern spent so much money building a fancy new science center, which is mostly unusable covered space, and now there aren't enough desks.
We have some excellent faculty allies. The admin is interested in doing the same thing to faculty (making them share space) and so faculty is 100% on our side. Hence we had a public letter with 250+ signatures including many faculty.
I agree they likely over-accepted and spent money poorly but I can't say for certain, as I'm not in admin and thus not privy to these details.
