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Comment by afraid_to_speak | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this is the actual issue? HR doesn't have to be upheld to the sixth amendment.

If someone makes a complaint about me at work, I don't exactly have the right to know my accuser. The issue is that the people that now make up these corporations and various education administrations don't care about these protections people are granted when dealing with the federal government.

Maybe they should be? That would be an extremely hard legal argument to make, that would go up against the first amendment and the idea of freedom of association.

After all, no one is forcing you to teach at Stanford right?

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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.

> 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

"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.

> 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.)

>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.

To nitpick the nitpick, Stanford actually is held to some Constitutional standards, thanks to California's Leonard Law, which requires private universities to provide the same free speech protections as public universities. It does not incorporate the 6th Amendment, but to the extent that this system can be used to suppress constitutionally protected speech acts it could run afoul of California's specific requirements.

The law: https://web.archive.org/web/20090430235943/http://www.leginf...

Some analysis: https://academeblog.org/2020/06/27/stanford-and-the-legacy-o...

> After all, no one is forcing you to teach at Stanford right?

Sure, the point is not that the bill of rights applies to Stanford. The point is that the teachers are morally right, for the same reason that we have the 6th ammendment.

Its unclear to me the point you are trying to make. It reads to me that you think because that law does not apply here that the principles involved do not?

Your points about freedom of association are likewise illegible in this context.

The principles outlined in the Bill of Rights are within the context of a relationship with a government that uses force to apply their actions without any higher recourse. Losing a job is different in magnitude than being sentenced to death or imprisonment.

Anonymous accusations are easy to abuse. They should be treated with a skeptical eye regardless of the context. Any institution that makes decisions on such accusations is going to be rife with petty, vindictive politics.

Whenever an institution makes the decision to start taking anonymous accusations seriously, you can bet the bureaucracy of that institution has already been captured by precisely the sort of people who are eager to abuse such a system. To anybody else without such a malicious intent, the hazards of anonymous accusations should be obvious.

Be very careful when seeking to reform such a system, because those you are trying to disarm will use those very same bureaucratic weapons to stop you.

I don’t disagree. But “should” is different than “fundamental right”.

The original post wasn't saying that the bill of rights binds the behavior of this school in this case, but pointing out that the reason that's protected as a fundamental right in our constitution is that, given cover of anonymity, accusations are highly weaponizable—that's the reason that's included as a fundamental, enumerated right—which fact will apply to most any institution, whether or not it's legally required to allow one to face one's accuser.

Yes. It is important to remain cautious of anonymous accusations since they can pave the way for the implementation of algorithmic prosecution or a zero tolerance policy.

So you wouldnt suggest that you should generally be able to know who your accuser is (the principle), but rather that is a standard we hold the process of whether or not some one can out you into a little box?

Thats coherent. I was originally thinking about this as a 'good for the goose, good for the gander' situation because the idea that you should generally speaking know who is accusing you and of what seems pretty reasonable.

Those don't apply to "at-will" employment - you have freedom of speech in that you won't be sent to jail, but you can easily be fired for something you say. That law actually doesn't apply here because the situation is different. This affects freedom of association because it supports the rights of individuals to form organizations, and also for the organization to deny membership, so the school has the right to remove a professor if the student body doesn't want them for some reason

so the school has the right to remove a professor if the student body doesn't want them for some reason

Yes, but is that a good idea? Latest example: the incident at Hamline University, where a student felt offended when he was shown Mohammed images in an art history class. These were not the CIA-sponsored Jyllandsposten kind designed to incite outrage but perfectly orthodox Persian and Mughal miniatures with scenes from the Islamic prophet's life. Universities have a purpose in society, and the at-will cater-to-students atmosphere really doesn't help that.

Also - freedom of association and freedom of speech, these are extremely valuable rights, they are necessary for the functioning of society and rightfully enshrined by the constitution. But what good are they if you can get fired for associating with the wrong kind of people (atheists? Satanic Temple?) oy saying the wrong this (perhaps the word "transsexual"?

It's a difficult problem that is not helped by facile "from first principles" analysis.

Stanford takes lots of federal money so HR is bound to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, plus Title IX and Section 504. If the bias investigations result in a discriminatory disparate impact or some kind of double standard they will eventually get steamrolled.

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