I don't think any explanation about a particular site is needed. I came to believe that we in HN all agreed that mass surveillance is bad and that promoting HTT

I don't think any explanation about a particular site is needed. I came to believe that we in HN all agreed that mass surveillance is bad and that promoting HTTPS everywhere is the least we can do make surveillance more difficult. Just as no one would want government agents following them around as they go about their day attending university lectures, and just as we wouldn't be happy with that agent asking us "Why, what do you have to hide?", we also shouldn't be comfortable with having our visit to resources on stanford.edu be open to surveillance by every node on the network. In a world where even example.com uses TLS, we can surely expect the same from all Stanford subdomains.