Your conflation that free speech is under attack is disappointing - That's not what is happening here.
If people don't want to associate with a person who says awful things, it's not a violation of their freedom of speech to disassociate with them.
[1] - This event was started by somebody sending a copy of a discussion on a private mailing list to a third party. This third party then took social media and shared it. It fell flat, except for a handful of 'Twitter activists'. They then started spamming it off to their followers and media outlet they could find. Some of the clickiest baitiest institutions took it up along with some completely unrelated Twitter personalities. It all spun what were relatively innocuous comments into limited context outrage bait and that then caught the outrage train spot on.
Time will come there will be regulations aiming to fix that, because slander laws apparently aren't enough. And then people will come out and talk about freedom of speech, but the only answer will be, "you had it, and you misused it, and almost ripped the society apart".
Your freedom of speech doesn't trump anyone else's freedom of speech. If someone is knowingly or recklessly spreading harmful lies, you have recourse for that, but freedom of speech includes freedom of angry speech, and outside of harmful knowing and reckless lies, it included the freedom to be wrong in your speech.
McCarthyism was a direct violation of the first amendment. This does not compare.
In case anyone missed my general point there, it was:
One can be worried about the chilling effects on speech, regardless of who is doing it; dismissing such concerns "because it didn't violate a law"[1] is confused, and a kind of category error.
[1] edit: or, in your case, relying on a court for all relevant judgments about this matter
This has also been said before, but free speech specifically includes the right of others to dissociate from you because of your speech, as a central aspect of their freedom of speech, and in fact such dissociation is a central part of the concept of the marketplace of ideas supported by free speech.
> the idea that someone's livelihood is under threat due to their speech can be just as coercive as threatening a fine or jail for their speech
Yes, the fact that our society doesn't provide a minimal non-market guarantee of livelihood makes free interaction coercive economically coercive for many people. The problem is not with free interaction, however.
Neither MIT or FSF should be required to continue to associate with RMS if his views are repugnant to their organizational core.
I don't think the distinction between government and private institutions is that meaningful though. When a constitution is preventing the government from infringing upon a right it's usually a good idea if that right is protected against other people as well. In fact freedom of speech is covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly wasn't intended to only protect people against their own governments.
Consider this: were you to come to GP's office and show GP's boss a printout of them saying controversial things on HN, demanding GP's termination, GP would most likely keep their job and there would be a good chance you'd get kicked out by security. In order to get a company to fire someone, there needs to be a public mess, and those rarely happen organically. In this case, and other similar firings for wrongspeak that I can think of, a public storm was created intentionally.
Can't see it as anything else than a weaker, non-lethal form of swatting.
I'm not sure how "private conversation" should be defined. If someone wrote something on HN, is it really private? In the case of RMS, I don't know enough about this mailing list to know whether it was private or not.
I'm also not sure whether "private conversation" matters a lot. For instance, a governor of Puerto Rico was apparently sending homophobic and misogynistic messages around in a private messages. Is it less bad for being in a private conversation?
To your hypothetical: If I was so upset with someone that I felt the need to go to their employer and complain about them, that seems like my right to free speech and expression. If, after security kicked me out, I took the matter to the local newspaper and it caused an uproar, that also seems like my right.
I'm not sure either. HN, or CSAIL mailing list, are community chatrooms that sometimes spill out into the world at large, but their day-to-day activity concerns their respective communities. You do not expect to see what you wrote there aired in mainstream news.
> I'm also not sure whether "private conversation" matters a lot.
I suppose it doesn't in the case of publicly recognizable people or public officials; this sort of comes with the territory. But what private (or semi-private) conversations introduce in this picture is a "kill chain" - a chain of people or organizations involved in taking a private message and turning it into a mob forcing one's employer's hand. I think it's worth to take a closer look at that chain - especially in this case, where you can clearly witness an increasing level of misrepresentation happening. The original post, for instance, stayed just a bit shy of making accusations that could be subject of a libel lawsuit, implying but not stating a lot of things. And then the media coverage did its usual misrepresentation amplification.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for shooting the messenger - just that there should be some pressure in the society which ensures messengers are communicating their messages accurately. Ironically, the subject of this outrage is that pressure - RMS attempting to correct inaccuracies.
> If I was so upset with someone that I felt the need to go to their employer and complain about them, that seems like my right to free speech and expression. If, after security kicked me out, I took the matter to the local newspaper and it caused an uproar, that also seems like my right.
Depends on the reason for you being upset, I would hope that the paper would either pick it up and air it, or laugh you out of the room too. But you're right, it's technically your right to try. But still, I think there's something wrong with trying to end someone's career - thus causing significant, real, material harm to them - just because you personally found their speech offensive. It's like a lightweight form of swatting someone because you got angry.
> Depends on the reason for you being upset, I would hope that the paper would either pick it up and air it, or laugh you out of the room too.
Yes, absolutely.
In an ideal world, if there isn't a deeply troubling reason to be upset, a respectable media outlet should (in an ideal world) push back. And an employer should want to defend its employees against trumped up nonsense.
In this world, I fully appreciate that many media outlets love controversy and clicks, and it may be easier for a company to just fire someone than stand up for them and deal with said shit-storm.
> I think there's something wrong with trying to end someone's career - thus causing significant, real, material harm to them - just because you personally found their speech offensive. It's like a lightweight form of swatting someone because you got angry.
I agree completely that trying to end someone's career is very extreme. I take no position regarding the specific case of whether or not RMS should have resigned.
I would, though, push back against drawing an equivalence between swatting and trying to end someone's career.
I can easily imagine cases where I would try to end someone's career. For instance, if I had evidence that someone in law enforcement had a deep hatred of {women, men, gays, straights, Blacks, Whites, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, ...}, that would be deeply problematic. If I then saw them unfairly {arrest, harass, ...} someone in the hated group, it would seem very reasonable to object strongly to them continuing in their career.
I'm not standing 100% by this analogy, but the similarity is that in both cases someone, out of anger or spite, abuses a huge lever the society has to punish misbehavior just to ruin someone's day, but the lever has a good chance of ruining someone's life. This works for both "SWAT team" and "virality on social networks" as values of "lever".
> I can easily imagine cases where I would try to end someone's career.
In your example, it would be reasonable to object strongly - given that you had evidence that someone in law enforcement had a deep hatred, like if you "saw them unfairly {arrest, harass, ...} someone in the hated group". I'd still hope you'd try the proper channels first, but if they fail, this is a matter of public importance. But the kind of thing we saw here - in this RMS story and other public outrage stories - doesn't meet the standard of evidence you described.
(Also, law enforcement is a somewhat special case, because it's a position of privilege and power, when one acts with authority of the state. You definitely want to police people wielding this power aggressively, but you shouldn't apply the same aggressiveness to random folks doing regular jobs, like scientists or plumbers or programmers. Former is preventing abuse of power; latter is just destroying someone's livelihood through vigilante mob justice.)
So what I'm saying isn't "don't ever go after one's career", just don't do it if your reasons are that you are offended by something you read. Ruining someone's livelihood like this is one of the most extreme form of damage you can legally do to another human being; it's thoroughly aggressive act, and it should only be done in circumstances justifying it. Words alone almost never are.
If grouping up people does cause them to lose that right, perhaps that characteristics of rights kicks into effect when dealing with sufficiently large institutions, especially ones who have significant tie in with government far beyond some small mom and pop employer.
Whether it's good or bad for society is a complex topic, but spending your time riling up a digital mob every time someone says something controversial can't be a personally healthy way to live.
Stallman had said more than enough to merit his termination IMO, but he still deserved due process before such judgment was passed.
As a business owner, if I felt that an employees continued employment was a net negative for my profitability, I'd be forced to let them go. Perhaps I could keep them for a while, but that's the case.
Yes, I think powerful people facing consequences for doing and saying absolutely abysmal things is a net good for society. Going from no, to some, in egregious cases, accountability is great. RMS shouldn't get a pass for this. Especially not since he's done the same thing before. Especially since now it's concrete and deals with real people and not just abstract ideas.
The threat of an abstract "you could get fired too for saying a truly terrible thing" falls flat because, well, I don't make a habit of doing that. You'd have better luck claiming that I benefit from people making statements that could get them mobbed. But that too is unconvincing: people who I benefit from sharing their views are pushed out anyway via structural dynamics, often due to the things powerful people who don't face consequences do and say.
And then of course, it's not like my life, or his would be ruined. Damore is, as I understand it, gainfully employed and mostly out of the public eye.
I'll ask my questions again since you didn't answer: what due process does one deserve before being fired? What of that did Stallman not receive?
That's fair. However in this case, his "eccentric" views were widely known for years in the FS/OS community. It took a media shitstorm to turn that into a firing offence, which tells you it's not about the content of the views.
> As a business owner, if I felt that an employees continued employment was a net negative for my profitability, I'd be forced to let them go.
That's fair too, and similar argument can be made for a non-profit. At best all I could accuse the various organizations that disassociated with RMS is that they lack backbone and yield to pressure, or try to capitalize on the outrage, but that's not a problem.
Market entities do what they do. But they wouldn't have to, if the story wasn't spun. It's not the e-mails themselves that ended his career, it's how they were fed to the media and then blew up there - especially as this story shows how the reporting doesn't even have to be truthful; lying in a headline and not linking to primary source is standard journalism nowadays.
> The threat of an abstract "you could get fired too for saying a truly terrible thing" falls flat because, well, I don't make a habit of doing that. You'd have better luck claiming that I benefit from people making statements that could get them mobbed. But that too is unconvincing: people who I benefit from sharing their views are pushed out anyway via structural dynamics, often due to the things powerful people who don't face consequences do and say.
Today me, tomorrow you. Each of us has said something that could be misconstrued into a fireable offence, and the problem is that structural dynamics and mob sentiments change; if you accept people being labeled as undesirable for just expressing an atypical opinion and attempts at removing such undesirables from the society, don't be surprised if five years from now it happens to someone you like.
> And then of course, it's not like my life, or his would be ruined. Damore is, as I understand it, gainfully employed and mostly out of the public eye.
Damore is young, and its firing was on such weak grounds that there was a lot of people who wouldn't mind him on board once publicity died down. (At least that was just after the firing; I haven't followed his life since, but I hear that he ended up radicalizing; wonder if the mob ended up being the cause.) RMS is AFAIK 66, and haven't worked in software in 40 years. His job was essentially being an icon of the movement, and now that this was destroyed, he's essentially unemployable. At best, he'll retire.
> I'll ask my questions again since you didn't answer: what due process does one deserve before being fired? What of that did Stallman not receive?
I purposefully didn't use the words "due process". Anyway, I'll answer with a counterquestion: what protections do people deserve from being killed in a flood or an avalanche? Floods and avalanches kill people, that's what they do. And yet protections are instituted so that innocent people don't find themselves unexpectedly in harm's way. Similarly, companies fire people who become a net loss to them, but in recent years, there's been an uptick of cases where someone's private or semi-public conversations have been misconstrued and blogged or Tweeted about with the express purpose of causing a public outrage and ruin the career of that someone. Maybe we need to talk about protections from such events, and even focus on the people who push others under the train because they find their opinions offensive.
To continue with military analogies, social media storms are like gas weapons. They're effective if launched at a distant enemy (though if you're not careful, the wind may carry it back towards you), and not something a force would use around itself when engaged in combat.
That said, I have a nagging worry from watching some videos of his behavior that he is mentally ill and there might be a backlash from that.
But why we can't allow a process like that to transpire before passing judgment is beyond me. Why wishing such an impartial judgment upon him is downvote worthy is really worrisome to me. That's not what western democracies are about as I understood them up to now.
I Just do not believe we should make career-ending decisions like this based on the rage of a mob on social media, that's literally a Black Mirror episode (and a really bad episode of The Orville as well). I believe their role is to raise awareness of situations like to the point where the above should transpire. Does holding that viewpoint now make me subject to "cancellation" as well?
TLDR: the accusation of harassment is 100% determined by the accuser. The determination of whether harassment occurred OTOH is decided by HR after judging the merits (or lack thereof) of the case.
I see no reason why MIT shouldn't have proceeded similarly. And while you might argue that's not 100% impartial, that's a lot better than a Twitter mob (to me at least).
Given the piles of video and text of Stallman being Stallman, and the "Hot Ladies" bit on his office door, do you really think they would have high-fived his conduct and told him to carry on? I'm cynical, but I'm not that cynical.
Or let's put this another way. The Unabomber and Charles Manson got their due process. Are you saying Stallman is worse than both of them? So I'm guessing you guys downvoting me no longer believe in our legal system? That'll end well I'm sure.
https://twitter.com/corbett/status/994012399656042496
https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/994267277460619265
https://twitter.com/wiredferret/status/1173042834179534849
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/d5dxf3/stal...
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/d5dxf3/stal...
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/d5dxf3/stal...
When it's this widely known that he likes to creep on women, the only thing that makes sense is that HR has had plugs in their ears the whole time.
PS The Kelsey Merkley talk is fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y0FuH5FNCo
No. But I do think you're not really looking at this situation objectively. Here's what you've said:
1. It's clear that an objective board should have fired RMS
2. We shouldn't make these decisions based on mobs
Additionally, we know he was fired. With that information, you can't make any conclusions. How and why are you so certain that some board didn't weigh the evidence and pass objective judgement? The problem with this fear of "cancel culture" (which as others have mentioned is really just "holding powerful people accountable when they do bad things culture"), is that so far I haven't seen any evidence that the bad things people fear have happened. RMS did a bad thing. He faced consequences for a thing that even you agree was a bad thing. Your only concern is that it is possible, not even certain, that the method by which he faced consequences for an action that we both agree was bad and deserved consequences might have not have been up to a standard that few employees anywhere get.
I want to stress that last bit: very few employees are afforded the privilege of an impartial committee to decide whether or not they should be fired in any circumstances. You're arguing that RMS should get a stronger protection than your average employee (either that or that workers should, in general, have much, much stronger protections than we currently give them).
tl;dr:
> I believe their role is to raise awareness of situations like to the point where the above should transpire.
To me, this looks like exactly what happened. Why are you complaining?
Even when they're caught, they get put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) which is shorthand for giving them 60 days to find a new job or to turn their life around internally. Usually, it leads to the former, sometimes the latter. I've seen both.
It's an imperfect and biased process. But the attempt is usually made because HR fears unjustified termination lawsuits despite the "at will" employee status of just about everyone.
Unless they've tried to hack the company's servers for private data, I've never seen anyone fired on the spot without the above process unfolding. Maybe your experience differs?
PS I also think Charles Manson and The Unabomber were unambiguously guilty. That doesn't change my opinion that they deserved the trial they got.
PPS If as amyjess seemingly suggests that female professors at MIT repeatedly filed complaints against him and nothing happened, well then carry on Twitter mob, good job, seriously.
RMS isn't an employee of the Tech industry. He's a university something (visiting professor, I think, but not a tenured or official faculty position). Members of the tech industry are also unusually privileged in this regard. Ask a line cook or an employee at a department store if they're given a PIP if they are underperforming. And again, by all accounts, it is possible, and even likely, that there was such a process spurred on by the twitter mob. So its not clear to me what your complaint is. To address it, let me be more explicit: What would you like MIT to have done differently in this situation?
As I see it, they have a few options. They could of course not fire stallman. We agree this is unacceptable. Objectively he deserves to be fired. They could have already fired him, this is perhaps the best solution but requires time travel or foresight MIT lacks. I guess this suggests MIT hasn't yet developed that technology or skill. They could wait to fire him, which costs them PR, and potentially causes others to resign, for no gain (they're going to fire him). Or they could do what they did: fire him now. Again I wonder: what are you complaining about?
> PS I also think Charles Manson and The Unabomber were unambiguously guilty. That doesn't change my opinion that they deserved the trial they got.
You're conflating being fired from a job and being imprisoned, or in Manson's case, sentenced to die. Those two things aren't remotely comparable.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/04/former-photog...
Stallman OTOH didn't even have tenure. The bigger story for me is if repeated complaints of sexual harassment (leg grabbing etc) went nowhere until now. That's unacceptable and I suddenly side with the Twitter mob in that case because if so he's had his due process already. And in that case, not only is he an ass, but he probably drove a lot of women out of the field and that can't be undone.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
No. They say, "Ralph, pack your stuff. You're gone." Hell, I've been laid off via a Jabber message.
That's, perhaps unintentional, misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what people worried about it mean by it. The problem with "cancel culture" is the propensity to "shoot first, ask questions later", the doling out of punishment grossly unproportional to the crime. Like in this case - ruining one's entire career for the crime of being pedantic and tactless on a semi-public mailing list[0]. Or, in another, overhearing a joke in a private conversation between two people and making a social media mess that resulted in termination of the joker.
The problem with "cancel culture" isn't the part where it aims to hold people accountable for their behavior. The problem is with the mechanism, which involves setting off a chain reaction. There's the wronged or felt-offended party and initial outrage, which gets amplified as the stories get reshared and republished, usually accruing misrepresentations and outright lies in the process, until the reaction fizzles out in a day or three, and punishment happens. You'll note here that the final impact is not correlated with the scale of the initial wrongdoing, but with how many people get outraged how fast, and how far they reshare, all of which is moderated by how misleading can the story be made and by what else is currently on the news.
I think it isn't fair to dismiss concerns of people worried that "holding people into account" - not just powerful ones, but regular ones too - increasingly often involves attempts at setting off a social equivalent of an ad-hoc, hastly-made fission bomb.
--
[0] - Yes, there's apparently patterns of worse behavior going back many years. But pulling the trigger in the middle of one of the bigger scandals in our industry, that's awfully convenient and points towards the actual reason not being related to past behavior.
The person I was discussing with agrees that Stallman's actions and history, combined, merited his resignation or removal. Yet they used the phrase "cancel culture" anyway.
Please don't blame anyone but Stallman for ruining his career. His history of pedophilia-apology, his history of acting badly, possibly to the level of harassment, around women at MIT, and recently his need to "well-acktually" statutory rape ruined his career.
> You'll note here that the final impact is not correlated with the scale of the initial wrongdoing, but with how many people get outraged how fast, and how far they reshare, all of which is moderated by how misleading can the story be made and by what else is currently on the news.
No, I don't note that. Pressure was put on MIT leadership by women at MIT, women who had historically been ignored when they raised similar issues about the same person in the past. As MIT said, this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
> that's awfully convenient and points towards the actual reason not being related to past behavior.
No it doesn't. It points to the trigger not being past behavior, with which I fully agree. It says nothing about the scale of the reaction by MIT or the FSF. Those were without a doubt informed by a pattern of behavior.
Perhaps because his resignation/removal didn't happen as a direct result of the combined history of transgressions, but only after someone took a fresh, minor offense and blew it out of proportion, so that it ended up in mass media. There's a difference between resigning (or being forced to) because of a pattern of bad behavior, and that plus having your name in the Forbes under a headline that contains a lie.
> Those were without a doubt informed by a pattern of behavior.
If this issue didn't blow up across the whole Internet, do you think they'd terminate him now?
> If as amyjess seemingly suggests that female professors at MIT repeatedly filed complaints against him and nothing happened, well then carry on Twitter mob, good job, seriously.
And add that it doesn't matter. If it takes a twitter mob to force MIT to finally act ethically and remove a person with a history of bad behavior, good thing twitter mob. The solution to your concern is simple: institutions should be more proactive about self policing. If RMS had been fired 10 years ago, this mob would have no reason to exist.
Oh my God, no. Stallman has been a problem for years. Shooting first and asking questions later is the exact opposite of the problem.
Do you really find murder to be equivalent to this?
It’s an old saying that a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Now it’s more like, 10 times around the world, and nobody even gives a damn what the truth ever was.
Or to put it another way, wrong-think statements can be weaponized against the speaker more effectively than ever.
There are a lot of incendiary political topics de jour where it's obvious that important voices are being silenced. See, for example, the pseudoaddiction post from SSC yesterday. Popular uprisings are often based on kernels of truth, but the conversation becomes distorted when experts or just laypeople with diverse viewpoints decide, fuck it, it's just not worth the liability of weighing in.
A couple weeks ago there was a story about a minor girl in high school charged by a prosecutor and found guilty by a judge of distributing child pornography--upheld on appeal--for texting her friends a video of herself. [1] But if it's political suicide to even try to have a conversation about how the laws on child pornography could be harming children, then it will never be fixed.
So at some point it should be acceptable for someone to stick their head out and say, "This term 'sexual assault' it doesn't really mean what most people think it means a lot of the times. It would make for much healthier discussion if we could be more specific!" Or, "These arbitrary age barriers (which change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) can catch innocent people engaging in consensual intimate acts." And it's also OK for someone else to say, "That's just not what happened in this case, because <reasons>... and you're blinded in this case by your relationship with the accused." But at the end of it, for everyone to agree that there was a conversation in good faith and everyone can decide for themselves who's right, wrong, or an imbecile trying to cover for a friend, without demanding a head on a platter.
You can take a look at what Lessig wrote about Ito [2] and likewise come away from it entirely incensed and calling for Lessig to resign, or pondering whether the story is more complex than the headline. Where in that case, the NYT took a complex issue that Lessig tangled with, and turned it into;
“It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying.”
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/mds-top-co...
[2] - https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7
That's why it's called the court of public opinion.
I went to see a Stallman lecture when I was at university too. They had booked the biggest lecture theatre and it was packed. But why? If my friend comes to me and says "Hey, I'm staying late today to see a talk by random spokesperson John Doe advocating free software. Wanna join?", my reaction is going to be: "Meh." You can have that any day of the week at any university that's seen as a desirable forum for public policy debate. But: "Wanna see the guy who created emacs and a billion other bits of software every one of us uses every single day? Wanna stick around afterwards for conference food and exchange a few sentences of smalltalk so that, for the rest of your life, you can tell people you ACTUALLY MET HIM?" Then "Hell yeah, count me in!"
So if you take everything a man has in life - everything he anchors his identity to - and destroy it, and leave little to no chance of regaining it, what do you think happens? Personally, I am worried.
If RMS commits suicide because his life was ruined after someone lied and spun his linguistic pedanticism as support for sexual crimes, if that happens, will you come back and say that "this is what consequences for shitty behavior look like"?
Also, his wrong is again his language pedanticism - comparing it to actual assault like you did just now is disingenuous and precisely what the crowd did to RMS.
> The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether.
and
> The broadcast of pornography should be allowed on daytime television, with only violent pornography limited to the late evening, according to the party. Toddlers should be given sex education and youths aged 16 and up should be allowed to appear in pornographic films and prostitute themselves.
There is a group of people on-line who like to point to the "paradox of intolerance" as a justification for Internet lynch mobs. But this paradox works both ways. What it says is that society needs to combat people who label others as undesirables, intending to remove them from said society. But if someone fighting the intolerants ends up labeling tangential people as undesirable and unleashing pitchforks on them, that person is an intolerant too, and needs to be stopped as well.
There's a difference between information being available to the general public, and putting a spotlight on that information.
If Mr.Stallman were to be in Epstein's Island well that is whole level of any issue.
Committing Rape and Questioning the logic behind defining the "act" of rape are not the same.
Basically, looks like this situation was a long time coming.
https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/archives/200...
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...
But to be clear, that's still a bed of his own making.
Source: http://wordsideasandthings.blogspot.com/2012/03/instrumental...
The first amendment is really of no use if expressing opinions outside the norm causes you to be fired by social convention. In that case, only being independently wealthy affords one any freedom.
In this case, even founding his own organization based on his own values did not protect him from being fired.
Does a person or institution have to be literally owned lock, stock and barrel by the public to act in a public capacity?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In that vein, I would see the government limiting the ability for someone to speak out against anything as a violation of their Free Speech/First Amendment rights.
A university is not a merely public place, but rather one which enjoys a charter from the state -- and numerous benefits as far as funding, taxation, access to information and research opportunities -- as an educational institution.
An example of the concept being applied to quasi-public entities, with enough generality for the legal realm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...