There is a huge area between being "surrogate parents" and being outright inhumane.
> For more than a day no one had any idea where I was — not even my parents.
The rest is equally horrifying, but this boggles my mind on top of all that. Is it too much to ask to at least inform her parents? What could be a sane justification for not doing so?
But it's perfectly legal for someone to decide that an adult is still suicidal when they say they are not, having them taken away and locked up without allowing them a phonecall? If that's mental healthcare in the US, I wonder what abduction is like.
I know. Still, there is a difference between them not having consent because they weren't given consent, or because they haven't even asked for it. Maybe not legally, but I morally for sure. (I simply assume that the article isn't leaving out that they asked her, and that she said no.)
Yale does have the right to decide if she attends or not, and here's why:
Every individual has the right of free association. If you're hosting a party, you have the right to tell one or all of your guests to go home, whenever you want, for any reason (and they have the right to never come back if you mistreat them). The same applies to larger groups of people: the right of free association doesn't disappear when they form a group such as Yale university. Whatever rights a group has are ultimately no more or less than the rights of its individual members.
Some people say that rights entail certain responsibilities. On that view, however, rights are indistinguishable from gifts. If rights entail responsibilities, you don't actually have the right to choose your friends; society merely tolerates your choices, so long as you follow parameters set by others. Your own judgement and preferences become a secondary concern, to be overridden by the group. (If this sounds farfetched, recall that eugenicists employed this type of thinking in their calls for forced sterilization: the rights of the "unfit" be damned, they said, for the good of the group hangs in the balance.)
I want to clarify my general point on rights entailing responsibilities just a little further: my view of rights is not a sanction of wanton irresponsibility. No one has the right to push a person off a cliff (excepting situations of self-defense). Nor do they have the right to smash people's windows, steal car stereos, etc. Put another way, no one has the right to violate another's rights.
I'm out of time, so I'm going to stop here, even though there is obviously a lot more to cover on this topic.
