[HALtheWise]

Nitpicking, but I think people here often don't think clearly about the value of expecting Constitution-inspired behaviors from non-government organizations. This frequently comes up when discussing free speech on moderated online platforms.

In particular, there are underlying reasons that we want the US government to respect certain individual freedoms, and to the extent that some other organization is sufficiently government-like, we might want it to respect those freedoms for it's users for similar reasons. In the case of a university, I think it's pretty clear that Stanford is a de-facto government over the students attending there. Sure, attendance is technically voluntary and you can leave at any time, but that's also true of normal governments, especially state and local governments. The key thing is that being forced to leave your home and community to avoid a state government violating your rights would really suck, so that gives them a significant position of power over you, and we have a constitution to ensure they don't abuse it.

Stanford absolutely has that level of power over its students, and so it's totally reasonable to claim that they ought to abide by due process restrictions that are similar to (although probably not identical to) those from the Constitution. These things aren't binary, a university can be government-like in some ways and private-citizen-like in others.

[floren]

> In the case of a university, I think it's pretty clear that Stanford is a de-facto government over the students attending there. Sure, attendance is technically voluntary and you can leave at any time, but that's also true of normal governments, especially state and local governments. The key thing is that being forced to leave your home and community to avoid a state government violating your rights would really suck, so that gives them a significant position of power over you, and we have a constitution to ensure they don't abuse it.

Not to mention that moving to another state requires... a U-Haul and an apartment lease. Becoming a "citizen" of Stanford takes a hell of a lot more work, and if you annoy somebody enough that he and a dozen friends make false anonymous reports to get you kicked out, well, that was your chance, hope you like CSU Chico.

edit: actually I googled Chico and it looks pretty nice, I was just trying to think of a "remote"/unfashionable state school, no offense meant to Chico grads

[chmod600]

"if you annoy somebody enough that he and a dozen friends make false anonymous reports to get you kicked out"

There's all kinds of reasons that might happen that aren't your fault. In the past, maybe having the wrong skin color might have done it. In the present, I'm sure you can think of some ways to be unpopular that aren't a good reason to get kicked out.

One-sided power is never good.

[dragonwriter]

> Nitpicking, but I think people here often don't think clearly about the value of expecting Constitution-inspired behaviors from non-government organizations

Especially when even for the government, those rules don't apply outside of the criminal sphere.

(Those rules that apply to government outside of the criminal sphere are more often appropriate expectations for fairness in private interactions; “due process” in broad terms is appropriate, whereas the specific criminal procedural protections generally are not.)

[dsfyu404ed]

>Especially when even for the government, those rules don't apply outside of the criminal sphere.

Which is a travesty seeing as how many various organizations within government can unilaterally take action that will f-up one's life as bad as a nonviolent misdemeanor.