Comment by ndriscoll
2 hours ago
The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society. This is why I'm saying that it is indeed a dodge. "It's complicated and you don't understand it" isn't an excuse for making the world worse. And yes, it is fully possible for a someone to make that judgement without a large background in law, because it's taking a holistic look at "what was the purpose of this law, and are they interpreting it in line with that purpose?" The details don't matter; the outcomes do. Their job is to deal with the details to reach the desired outcomes. If society is better off for putting them on a boat and sending them into the middle of the ocean, then they are incompetent.
Refusing to give a student their own data because of a privacy law that's meant to give the student control over their data is them failing. Full stop. There's no room for excuses for government funded entities to act in the exact opposite way that they are supposed to to avoid their fear of government imposed penalties from a deliberate misinterpretation of what the entire thing is about. That's incompetence by everyone involved. It is people going out of their way to make the world a worse place to act important. Absolutely unacceptable.
It's like if teachers aren't teaching the kids to read or add, the details about all the compliance stuff they need to worry about and how the school "can't" remove disruptive kids from a class or whatever is missing the point; the schools can't sacrifice actually doing their job at the alter of compliance, or we should just shut them down since all they do is waste resources. The compliance people should be figuring out how to shield the actual workers/create plausible deniability if the law is supposedly that stupid.
The world is complicated. Laws like FERPA are written with good intentions, but there are a lot of gray areas open to interpretation, and bad actors will take advantage of those gray areas to bring lawsuits for selfish purposes that universities have to spend money to defend themselves and possibly pay expensive penalties over. So lawyers advise how to follow laws in the most risk-free way.
Blaming lawyers or Instructure for "failing to contribute to society" is both incredibly immature and factually wrong. It's not the 1980's where jokes about "kill all the lawyers" get laughs.
I'm going to be blunt: you seem to have a kind of black-and-white, adolescent understanding of the world where it's split up into good actors and bad actors, and good actors should do what's right (regardless of the law) and bad outcomes are the result of bad actors. But that's not how the world works. Everybody involved can be intelligent and trying to do their best, and we get suboptimal outcomes because this stuff is hard. Writing laws that protect student data while maximizing student convenience are probably never going to get it perfectly right in every situation. But insulting the lawyers or the schools or Instructure as "failing to contribute to society" or insulting the law as "supposedly that stupid" is to deeply misunderstand everything.