Comment by ndriscoll
3 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.
It's not a misunderstanding of everything, especially for schools that are government funded. They have a mission, they receive resources from everyone else to do that mission. If they are then worried about penalties for some frivolous side distraction, and choose to not accomplish their mission for fear of that, then why are we funding them to start with?
Frankly it's a perspective that I've only developed as I got older and realized that such excuses are poor, and that the real world has quite a few people in it who don't really care about the outcomes of what they're doing, or even understand why they're there. To me it feels adjacent to the adolescent view I often see on this site/reddit around "why is the company laying people off when they're making lots of money?" It's because those people aren't needed for anything, and those jobs aren't a form of charity. They exist for a purpose. If they no longer have a purpose, why would you keep paying that person?
If people are going to exist as obstructions to the purpose of the institution we're trying to serve, then they are useless. It's like a computer security worker saying the best way to be secure is to unplug everything, and push for policies that no one shall use computers for anything. Completely missing the point.
Finding ways to follow the law in the most risk-free way to the detriment of everyone is exactly missing their purpose in the world, and everyone should rightly call such a person incompetent and useless. It's casual acceptance of this kind of incompetence culture that slowly leads to societal decline. It's the same kind of thing as when Berkeley took down their lectures because of the ADA. How about the same state that ignores federal immigration and drug law say that actually they're going to keep giving away their free educational materials because they want universal education, and giving those lectures away is strictly better than not doing that?
> The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society.
An old lawyer joke: What do you call 100 lawyers drowning in the ocean? A good start!
(Told to me by my dad, a former attorney till he retired.)