Stanford faculty say anonymous student bias reports threaten free speech
wsj.com
wsj.com
A fundamental right we have in the US is the right to face our accusers, for good reason. Here's the text of it:
> Sixth Amendment
> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
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?
Your points about freedom of association are likewise illegible in this context.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
The law: https://web.archive.org/web/20090430235943/http://www.leginf...
Some analysis: https://academeblog.org/2020/06/27/stanford-and-the-legacy-o...
...not in non-criminal government actions, or in private contexts.
If we want to play the textualist game, there's nothing in the 1st Amendment about free speech only for people who identify themselves unambiguously. The 1st Amendment applies to anonymous speech, too (especially).
The rationale for the explicitly criminal protections in the legal system, whether in the Constitution (like the Confrontation Clause at issue here) or the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that reaches back to English common law, is that criminal convictions regularly and explicitly result in noncompensable loss of rights, sometimes including life.
HR is not imprisoning or imposing corporal or capital punishments, the same rationale does not apply.
also, who would enforce it? say your company gives you a negative review because they don't like your work product - they now need to empanel a jury, and a judge? how is that going to work? if they don't, I'd imagine it'd have to be a criminal penalty because what would be the point if it was just civil? so now the gov't is forcing your company to have a trial over your review? give me a break, dude.
No. But if the consequence of an anonymous report causes you to lose your job, and potentially be blacklisted from any other academic jobs in the future, it seems prudent that some process would exist to make sure things are fair. Otherwise it can be abused and weaponized by people in ways most people wouldn't want to see. I don't see anyone arguing the government should do anything here. It appears to be an argument that institutions instituting new policies like the one mentioned in the linked post should have some kind of process to prevent them from being abused.
Maybe work on your reading comprehension? People are literally saying that due process should apply... I had a dozens-long interaction with someone insisting that the constitution is a set of principles that apply to any human interactions... there's massive misunderstanding proliferated around here, so I don't agree at all.
> It appears to be an argument that institutions instituting new policies like the one mentioned in the linked post should have some kind of process to prevent them from being abused.
No shit - did you see anyone arguing that they should just be processes that are rife for abuse? The question is "what is the standard?"
I's weird that a rational person like yourself conflates all anonymous speech with criminal prosecutions, a very narrow subset of public communications. Can you clarify what your broader position on anonymity is?
Anonymous complaints are ok and are important to allow. Providing an official method for "name and shame" based on anonymous complaints are not. Having a "bias-response team" come after you based on anonymous complaints is not acceptable.
The Supreme Court has ruled (as recently as 2014) that anonymity of report is not a barrier to an investigative stop by police, if the report includes sufficient detail to seem credible (Navarette v. California, 572 U.S. 393, 397 (2014)). That's why I don't think this issue is as simple as you originally presented it to be, notwithstanding the Constitutional language on the topic.
What I am saying is that they can be a valid basis for a police investigation, and the Supreme Court says this is Constitutional. It's possible that this shaped the design of Stanford's complaint handling process.
This was a pretty common tactic of oppression back before the war; it’s harder to plot a rebellion if a squad of Redcoats is camped out in your living room. I understand that China is fond of it as well.
> it is ok for McDonalds, the RIAA, Microsoft, or Elsevier to quarter their soldiers in your house even without asking for permission.
really? trespass and private property are not a thing, or just not in your hypothetical because it would obviously be stupid then? like, are you seriously argue that because the constitution doesn't prohibit people from coming into your homes, people can come into your homes? did you think that through?
> The “that amendment only restricts what the government can do” excuse comes up a lot when companies censor speech that they don’t like, and it is pretty funny to see it applied to some of the lesser–known amendments.
It's not funny at all, it's shockingly ignorant, actually, if anyone thinks what you posted.
So do you admit that if a private company forces you to have troops in your house, without your permission, this is still bad even though it is not literally the government doing it?
If you answer "yes, this is still bad, even though it's not the government" then congratulations you now understand the argument!
The argument is that people saying "well, it's OK because it's not the government doing it, it's a private corporation" are stupid.
Now, question for you. Did you read the original comment and really not come to this obvious conclusion/explanation of the argument?
It's seems like super obvious that the person was making fun of people who claim that something is OK because a private corporation is doing it.
And they are using a funny example of "well what if a corporation forced you to have soldiers in your house".
That funny example, makes the point pretty easy to understand.
This applies to due process as well, as the only organization or institution capable of levying criminal punishment is the US government, and thus, the only relevant subject of the limitations outlined in those amendments is also the US government.
You have misunderstood my post.
I said this: "this is still bad even though it is not literally the government doing it"
This is not contradicted by you saying that it is illegal for corporations to do it.
Yes, it is illegal for a private company to do this. But my point is that "Its bad!". Which has nothing to do with if it is illegal or not.
> even if there were no 3rd amendment.
But my point, is that regardless if the 3rd amendment exists, it is bad for either the government, or a private company to do this.
> Hence, the 3rd amendment restricting the government's right to quarter soldiers and not mentioning any other institutions.
I didn't say that the 3rd amendment has to mention other organizations. Instead, I am saying that no matter what the 3rd amendment applies to, or does not apply to, it is still bad if a private company, which is not the government, to put soldiers in your home, without your permission.
Now, to get to the argument here, the reason why this is being pointed out, that it is bad if a private company does this, is that the same logic could be applied to other things in the constitution.
That it is still bad if a private company does it, and also people saying "Well its OK because a private company is doing it" are making a dumb argument.
> This applies to due process as well, as the only organization or institution capable of levying criminal punishment is the US government
Wrong. Due process is still important, even for private companies.
Because due process is a valuable principle that could apply to non criminal punishment.
Yes, people care about non-criminal punishment being fair as well.
Just like how private companies putting soldiers in your home, without your permission, would be bad, even if it were legal, and its not the government doing it.
I am not saying that because it is in the constitution, it is valuable.
Instead, I am saying that the principle is valuable, and that this is why we put it in the constitution.
And that this idea of "don't put soldiers in my home without my permission", and "due process", and "free speech" are things that matter, regardless of the constitution.
And that therefore, people saying "well, its a private company doing it, therefore its OK" are wrong.
They are wrong, because these ideas "are things that matter, regardless of the constitution. "
The causation is reversed. We put them in the constitution, because they matter. Therefore, because these things matter, they matter outside of just the government.
> Due process is a valuable principle yes
Ok, you agree with me completely then, got it.
> what does the 3rd amendment have to do with anything
Because it is an example of something that matters, that thing being "don't put soldiers in my home, without my permission"
And this thing matters, both in the case of a private company, and the government doing it, even though the amendment only applies to the government.
It shows an example of this reverse causation. Where yes, the amendment only applies to the government. But the underlying principle also matters.
Therefore "Lol, its a private company" is a dumb argument.
:( Bad faith arguments make me sad
I can't argue against intentional misphrasings.
Yes, that’s why, e.g., the Constitution requires due process from government generally (see Amendments 5 and 14), not just in the criminal sphere.
But the 6th Amendment confrontation clause right is not the same thing as due process.
Similarly, it’s true that if McDonalds forced you to quarter their private security forces it would be tresspassing (at least). And it’s bad whether or not they are charged with trespassing.
It's literally trespassing - there is a law against, it need not be a constitutional amendment. Your point actually runs completely against your argument.
>Now, question for you. Did you read the original comment and really not come to this obvious conclusion/explanation of the argument?
I'm going to be perfectly honest with you and tell you that you think you are discussing something that is interesting, but you aren't. You don't realize this because you are really confused.
>It's seems like super obvious that the person was making fun of people who claim that something is OK because a private corporation is doing it.
Yeah but they misunderstand what the constitution is and does. We have laws against all sorts of conduct and do not require constitutional amendments as exemplars of the laws- so what's the point? That private individuals should have trials over everything that can be in dispute? have you even thought that through at all?
>That funny example, makes the point pretty easy to understand.
No it doesn't, it only reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how US law works and what the constitution is and does.
The constitution isn't a list of bad things, its a document that describes the gov't's powers and the limitations thereof. I think you are really confused. Trespass law has LONG preceded the constitution, so to whatever point you are making that "trespass is bad", that's like a pretty big NO DUH. The constitution doesn't take us any further in that understanding, I guess unless you are really and needed the third amendment as an example of a trespass? still really struggling to understand the fundamental brilliance of this argument...
So then yes it is bad! Even though a private company is doing it, and it is not the government, it is bad! You agree with me!
And therefore someone saying "well a private company is trespassing, and a private company is not the government" would be making a stupid argument.
> so what's the point?
The point is that the commonly brought up argument of "well it's a private company!" is dumb.
> Trespass law has LONG preceded the constitution
Indeed they have! And the reason is because there is an underlying principle of something that is bad, even if it isn't literally the government doing it. You agree with me.
Therefore someone saying "it's a private company" is making a bad argument.
> that's like a pretty big NO DUH
Oh it is extremely obvious that just because a private company is doing something, that something can still be bad, due to an underlying principle. You agree with me here as well.
And yet despite how extremely obvious this is, people still make this "well it's a private company!" Argument over and over again.
I am glad you agree completely with me, and not only that you think my point is obviously true.
> still really struggling to understand the fundamental brilliance of this argument...
The reason why it is funny is because people legitimately make this "it's a private company!" argument over and over again, which is a really dumb argument.
Have you truly never in your life heard someone making this "it's a private company!" argument?
That could be the confusion here.
>The point is that the commonly brought up argument of "well it's a private company!" is dumb.
It's not. You misunderstand the argument. That argument applies to the constitution. Not to things that are also paralleled in statute or the common law. That's the difference between the two. You don't call the police and say "someone is violating the third amendment" you call the police and say "someone is trespassing on my property!" they are similar in a vague principal, but not identical at all. The difference, I thought, was pretty obvious, but if you have questions, I'm happy to get into it.
>Therefore someone saying "it's a private company" is making a bad argument.
It's not, because there are differences between private actors and the gov't. The gov't, for example, is incredibly limited with regards to speech. Private actors aren't. You can't make me say anything. That's a good thing - do you understand that? The difference is, that the gov't is empowered to threaten you with your life and liberty in order to compel speech- except for the constitution. This has nothing to do with private actors. There is no principal that private actors can compel or restrict speech, because we are all free individuals that can choose to partake or not - that isn't the case when the gov't is involved. I'm surprised you don't seem to grasp this basic concept of civics.
>And yet despite how extremely obvious this is, people still make this "well it's a private company!" Argument over and over again.
Because they are referring to a limit placed upon the federal gov't by the constitution.
>I am glad you agree completely with me, and not only that you think my point is obviously true.
I don't agree with you completely. This is a bizarre way to conduct yourself.
>The reason why it is funny is because people legitimately make this "it's a private company!" argument over and over again, which is a really dumb argument.
Because those are contexts where the constitution doesn't apply. For example, there is an amendment that gives women the right to vote... what does that have to do with private actors? Nothing. Your argument that the constitution <-therefore-> anything else... is confused at best.
I am going to keep my response short to ensure that you cannot possibly misunderstand it.
Point 1.
There are principles that matter, even if it a private company doing the bad thing.
Agree or disagree with this directly.
Point 2.
Yes, if the government does bad thing X, it could be worse than if a private company does it, but it is still bad if a private company does it.
Agree or disagree with this 2nd point, directly.
Edit:
And point 3.
Some of those principles that are mentioned in the previous 2 points are in the constitution.
As in people care about things and principles and motivations, of the things in the constitution, even if it isnt literally the government doing the bad thing.
(Such as, for example, a private company putting soldiers in your house, without your permission)
2. too vague, for me to agree, again. there things the gov't can do that private companies can't. the gov't can, within the confines of the law, put you in jail, private companies cannot, so I don't think your point here makes any sense. sure, there are obviously some circumstances where that is true, just like in example 1, but you aren't offering it in that fashion.
3. you didn't mention any particular principals in the previous 2 points. The constitution isn't a list of principals. It's a list of restrictions on gov't conduct. Full stop. Like anything else in the world made by people, it reflects their principals to one extent or another (like this post, or website, or desk I'm typing on).
>As in people care about things and principles and motivations, of the things in the constitution, even if it isnt literally the government doing the bad thing.
Okay? That has nothing to do with what people are telling you when they say "it's a private company". They are saying, you can't rely upon the principle of the constitution alone, because the constitution isn't a list of principles (it's not the bible) its literally just a document that describes how the gov't works.
>(Such as, for example, a private company putting soldiers in your house, without your permission)
But this isn't a principle of society. Society has the principle that people are entitled to control the space they have the rights to, and that's reflected in numerous laws. What you cite isn't a principle, it's just a limitation of what the gov't can do.
You are backwards rationalizing the constitution into whatever principal you want to argue for. That's just not a good argument because the constitution doesn't list or even describe principles. The writers of the constitution wrote a lot about principles, and that's reflected in the specific limitations they placed on the gov't. But those authors would never say that the constitution is the basis of those principles, because it isn't. They would point to other writers, or documents, such as the bible, or the declaration of independence (which unlike the constitution, did declare a number of principles to be self evident, you might recall).
For example, if you wanted to say that private actors (companies) should not be able to restrict what their customers say because of the principle in the constitution, it's not a good argument. That is because a) the principle reflected in the is specific to gov't, b) because the constitution only addresses what the gov't should do, not what people should do. The constitution doesn't tell us how to behave, it tells the gov't how it cannot behave. So if you want to make an argument about what people should do or not do, there are probably some overlapping inspirational sources that underly the constitution, but the constitution ain't it.
So, once again, you are getting it quite backwards! I appreciate you pushing me to really make this clear on your terms, and not just be rude. But it'd be nice if you actually bothered to engage with what I'm saying in my response, which I see you haven't done with the others posters in this thread.
The 3rd amendment is about quartering soldiers without your allowance. It's become a kind of joke because it's basically never been relevant since it was written.
What you're saying is that Stanford should adopt the same line of reasoning embodied in the 6th amendment, to the extent that being accused in this fashion is a very high cost, and that the accuser should not be able to escape accountability for making false or misleading accusations. If the accuser thinks you did something wrong, they should stand up in public and say so.
As a general rule I tend to always interpret these discussions as "how humans interact with each other" unless the discussion itself is about the law.
At some point it's a distinction without a difference. Local code enforcement office can unilaterally levy fines on the same order as what the police dish out. Stanford can unilaterally screw up it's customers lives at least as well as defending one's good name from prosecution can.
OT: Unfortunately, prosecutors in the US have "absolute immunity" and cannot be prosecuted for bringing charges, no matter if they have financial/political/personal conflicts of interest, or the charges are illegal.
One of the important conclusions of the "Me too" debacle was that victims cannot make their accusations in public - in fact, many tried, for many years - because they face a much higher cost of doing it than the aggressor. It's only when they are organized as a group that their individual accusations gain power leaning on one another, otherwise each accuser taken individually is taking a (major) image cost, up to removal from the field. The traditional criminal system was powerless to give victims justice before this, and deviants in ppsitions of power could victimize dozens or hundreds of people.
So as long as participation in this anonymous process is entirely voluntary for the accused and the texts are treated as entirely made up until proven true, then they can be interpreted as a way of organizing a larger number of anonymous victims who don't know of one another, and a way for management to get an early warning of things they need to look into more closely.
If a certain academic is accused by ten anonymous people of sexual harassment, it could be an organized smear campaign from a disgruntled student or peer. If, however, those accusations follow them across multiple departments and academic years, there might be more there than meets the eye.
IANAL (I am not a lawyer), so maybe one could respond?
That's exactly what happened to Stallman, who was cancelled by a mob citing... an anonymous blog post!
> A fundamental right we have in the US is the right to face our accusers, for good reason. Here's the text of it:
That's the beauty of all these "ethics committees" or "institutional boards" : they don't have to adhere to the much stricter standards of a real court of law. This is, of course, by design.
I'm not so optimistic, there is an increasing pressure to erode this right slowly but surely.
We had seen several cases of sexual harassment claims by groups of anonymous people that can avoid the right by the simple process of retracting in the last second and refusing to sue or show proofs. This is basically free for the accuser tagged instantly as "the victim" but very efficient destroying lives and careers of the targeted people.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/not-enough-evidence-cha...
Ian Cole:
https://www.cbssports.com/nhl/news/nhl-finds-no-evidence-for...
And there was also the (particularly outrageous) Shitty Media Men list:
Powerful people often threaten those who are less powerful when they abuse them: If you tell anyone, I will ... ruin your career, kill you, hurt your family, prosecute you; harass, humiliate and persecute you (e.g., rape survivors), etc. That's why we have some anonymous reporting in some situations, to provide liberty and justice for all, not just for the powerful. It's the same reason anonymous speech seems an essential civil right to many at HN.
These days, a common reactionary rhetorical technique is to frame the desires of the powerful as if they are the vulnerable and powerless. What about their plight? ;) At the same time, insisting that anonymous reports - journalism, accusations, etc. - are invalid or violate their rights have long been a tool of the powerful: Make the vulnerable person expose themself to retribution, which also intimidates future victims from speaking.
There are no easy answers, but one approach is differentiating a report and a prosecution. For example, anyone can make an anonymous police report; if the subject of the report is to be tried and convicted, then the accuser needs to come forward.
How else do we protect the vulnerable without anonymity? How do we stop the powerful from running roughshod over them, unchecked?
> Anonymous accusations are a fine way to harass and intimidate anyone you disagree with or have a grudge against.
As discussed, that is not at all the only use for it. Do you have evidence about how common that is, for example at Stanford?
The only way seems to be to have a more-or-less independent panel who would look at the anonymous accusations and make an impartial decision on the same. The legal system, as it exists, seems to be such a body, definitely much more impartial and unbiased than a random administrator in Stanford.
How does Stanford process these reports? Also, the legal system is designed to handle prosecutions; I'd guess that only a small number of reports become any sort of prosecution.
Is he implying this is a reportable offense? I've never heard "G" used in a derogatory sense, rather always endearing. Do we not allow language to evolve?
but of course if someone consequently ignores others' request to call them by their name instead of various nicknames that might be where said identity has to adapt to be able to integrate into the group.
Perhaps the reporter didn't give us all the info from Mr. Sanchez, and there is more evidence of bias then we were informed of.
Yesterday somebody called me "dude". According to Wikipedia, dude was a replacement for "dandy" in the late 1800s. I'm gay. How dare thee??!! Where's my check?
That right there is the real problem. I’m convinced a huge motivation for a lot of the current performative outrage is a combination of conscious and unconscious anxiety about having very little to no real skill based leverage or ownership/stewardship of things that anchor you to society, like housing and kids. That’s the sympathetic angle. The unsympathetic angle is laziness and greed. Both are applicable.
Everything is so damn complicated and fast paced and fewer and fewer people seem to know how anything actually works. That means fewer and fewer people know what a reliable career track will be. A lot of people can’t pivot their skillset nearly as fast as tech is demanding and they’re worried they’re going to be made obsolete and left without any viable alternative path if the one they’re on dries up.
I think a lot of the performative outrage would disappear if the middle class regained stability and people felt like they owned something rather than felt like a replaceable cog in an unintelligible bureaucratic machine.
There is the other side of the coin that you are discussing, and it's what I pointed out above. The belief that all these things are an easy out to the financial problems you have, and that's the only reason why someone would complain about being called a "G".
I’m not arguing that there’s no legitimate level of complaint or job for helping employees relate to each other better, or that people shouldn’t strive to relate to each other naturally on each others’ terms, but it seems like there’s been a steep rise in bureaucracy that is less about actually encouraging productive cooperation and happy employees and a lot more about job stability for the bureaucracy.
That can be true despite there being a majority of good faith participation in that bureaucracy and a lot of employees who believe in the mission. If you get a job and you’re a decent person, which I believe the majority of people are, you want to do a decent job. But if it’s hard to find other comparable jobs, the need to feed and house yourself usually overrides considering whether or not your job is actually exacerbating the problem you’re tasked with solving.
I don’t think having people dedicated to monitoring employee communication for insensitive interactions and training people in the way that is currently done typically helps, I think it typically makes employees more paranoid and prone to overanalyzing interactions due to increased focus on sensitivities. Which is tragic, because again, I think most employees who get involved in jobs to help people communicate better legitimately want to be making a positive impact.
What does that have to do with people thinking that complaining that someone called you a "G" means you are now going to be rich? Seems completely besides the point. In fact, your whole response is.
A lot of performative outrage seems to be propping up a very large white collar industry of sensitivity training and related roles, and a lot of it might go away if there were more alternative, stable white collar industries that were related to skills taught in college and did not require constant learning and new skill acquisition.
I also think people who have a hard time learning new skills at the ever increasing pace technology demands lean on performative outrage as a way to scare employers and increase job security. If people felt more stable in their jobs, another chunk of performative outrage would probably disappear.
And I also think a lack of social belonging and attention from things like family and neighbors you’d get from a middle class household experience leads people to use performative outrage to get a fix of attention they’re missing.
I combined a lot of those ideas/what I’m saying may not have been clear, but those are all side effects of a shrinking middle class and pathways to the stable mass achievable paychecks that enable it.
You're just playing semantics with my words. Well past my meaning. Sure, not rich. Comfortable. Some people might call that rich, but they are obviously much more poor.
Maybe less thick-skinned students should just develop thicker skins.
Break the system. Flood it with bogus complaints until the people in charge learn why anonymous accusations are a bad idea.
I’m surprised this hasn’t happened already. Since it’s anonymous I would expect 4chan to flood all these stupid policies.
Maybe they selectively review and pursue.
New York City had to shut down its social-distancing 'snitch-line' after it was flooded by trolls brandishing penis pictures and Hitler memes
https://www.insider.com/new-york-city-social-distancing-snit...
Americans can be really awesome from time to time. We don't suffer well, and I'm happy for it.
If you're talking about an a student launching a complaint against another student, it should be non-anonymous because they are at the same power level.
If you're talking about a complaint against a faculty member or the school itself, or the government, anonymity should be allowed.
In this case, anonymity should be removed when it's a student complaining about another student.
> If you're talking about a complaint against a faculty member or the school itself, or the government, anonymity should be allowed.
I would just nuance this by saying yes, but so long as such anonymous complaints are only the beginning of the investigation, rather than the end.
Valid accusations and false accusations happen in all forms of law. There are commonly power or status differentials in the context of accusations. The constitution and 200+ years of case law have left our legal system far from perfect but far better than the ad hoc, administrator-defined, corporate insurance rate protecting pretend legal systems put in place by universities and the like.
The right to face your accuser is a critical right that exists to facilitate legal systems arriving at the truly best right answer.
How are either of those things determined? “Bad faith” seems to be a tool used to dismiss accusations without any objective basis, and determining if a claim is fraudulent may very well depend on the accused being able to rebut a claim based on knowing who the accuser in question is.
If the accused were guilty, then they'd already know who the victim is and already know who the accuser is, so hiding the accuser does nothing. Hiding the accuser is only ""useful"" when the accused is actually innocent. The entire point of hiding the accuser is to deny the wrongfully accused of the opportunity to defend themselves. Such systems are weapons created by and for bureaucrats to cement their power.
That’s only true if the accused knows the potential accusers and there is a small enough number of potential accusers that it could be reasonably narrowed down.
I think this is only a problem when people treat such accusations as evidence or proof of wrongdoing, which they absolutely are not. At most, it can be cause to investigate further.
We do have whistle-blower protection laws, and I think those serve an important function in our legal context.
There's the way we think the world should be, and then there's reality. Please let me know when you find the planet where this conversation takes place "Mr. Smith, the teacher, was just accused by a student of sexual assault. But it's just an accusation, there's no proof, so we'll begin an investigation, but in the meantime everything will go on as prior with Mr. Smith teaching his students."
And in fairness, if you had a kid in Mr. Smith's class, would you want him teaching your kid, even if the result was "Well, we did an investigation but we couldn't find any additional proof beyond the accuser's word, so all is back to normal."
There are many people (and quite a bit of case law) who believe the constitution governs everyone in every situation. If it’s for the people and by the people, then it’s to protect “the people” from government (which is “the people”). This includes private entities. Particularly, private entities receiving public funds (which Stanford is).
Anyway, in this particular case, free speech laws pretty much dictate you can’t seek reprisal for what people read.
I am a product of public schools and two state colleges. I saw tons of professors that used their personal feelings of a student to determine their grade. Sometimes this would work in the students favor, sometimes it would work against the student. Until no professors are doing that (I would say from my experience over half are) there absolutely needs to be anonymous reporting on faculty.
What you are advocating for it a system where professors can do anything they want and them simply blackball the student who makes a legitimate complaint and have all their professor friends do the same.
No.
I hear that you had bad experiences. That said, the right to challenge one's accuser dates back hundreds of years. It has survived as a foundational principle across millions of legal cases across all domains and including astronomical numbers of cases in which parties on either sides of the arguments have faced as much or more collusion risk than is claimed here. Anyone who thinks they can just type a few words into an internet comment thread and construct a legal system that better handles all the subtleties and realities of actual proceedings than we have in our court system today is either mistaken or the greatest legal mind in millennia.
The problem is not that we need you to try to invent a better system than the US legal system. The problem instead is we need to stop allowing bogus pretend legal systems that administrators at universities and similar institutions have tried to put in place using similarly naive legal theories. Those administrators suffer from the same hubris as anyone who thinks they can just sit down and write up how to do a functioning legal system in a paragraph or two. Each such system is deeply flawed in a different way, but all are deeply flawed. Real world accusations are always hard and messy, regardless of the domain, and coming to the correct resolution is never as easy as a one sentence "correction" to hundreds of years of jurisprudence would like to imply.
The "legal" systems constructed by these administrators are indeed deeply flawed, but arguing against core legal principals that have formed the foundations of legal theory for hundreds of years is not likely to be the path to improvement (and if it were to be, one is probably better off taking that once in a millenium legal insight in other directions of far greater impact to the world than complaining about a particular university's poorly conceived dispute structure).
If you want to say the professors/admins get the right to challenge ones accuser then they can no longer be involved in the process at all. Furthermore there needs to be criminal charges and jail time involved in any situation its warranted that is found true and the same for the accuser if it is found false. However this is NOT how it is. The staff are the process. Judges, juries, and executioners. Until that changes, my opinion is: no they do not get the right to face the accuser.
Curious how you feel about anonymous whistleblowers?
If the legislation survives for 50 years (it's not quite halfway there today), I'll accept it has passed the test of time. Until then, I'll likely continue to view it as a mistake but likely not for the reasons you expect.
Quoting from the Wikipedia page[0]:
> Between 1994 and 2010, the court had ruled for whistleblowers in only three of 203 cases decided on their merits, GAP's analysis found.
3 cases out of 204 means the court upheld 1.5% of Whistleblower claims. I find it extremely unlikely only 1.5% of claims had merit, or that only 1.5% would have succeeded in more conventional proceedings.
Anyone who throws away centuries of legal precedent in order to introduce a new legal concept to "improve things" and then produces a result that almost certainly provides worse outcomes for those it is supposed to protect was not, in my opinion, the once in a millenium legal mind that individual believed themself to be.
Given the high bar it needed to achieve to justify overturning centuries of precedent and the low bar it actually achieved, I think the Whistleblower legislation, as implemented, is an empirical failure.
Just so I know I am understanding you correctly you believe that more that 1.5% of the cases did have merit and if those cases would have been handled outside of the whistleblower legislation they probably would have been more successful?
Based on the statistics you provided that seems like a reasonable assumption. Do you happen to have any stats on the percentage of successful cases using more conventional proceedings. I feel like its probably a pretty hard metric to track.
Also, I believe those stats are about claims of retaliation to whisteblowers, which when adjudicated did not succeed on the merits. The information supplied by these whisteblowers may have been founded.
Whistleblower legislation is not about anonymity per se--it is supposed to encourage whistleblowers to engage with officials and inspector generals rather than make anonymous leaks to the press, collude, be abused, or do nothing. Imperfect for certain but better than nothing.
I'm sure this "anonymous" information will never get out, because of course third parties are extremely secure, and there are never leaks or data breaches.
It took a year of investigation to determine that two ropes hanging from a tree were the remains of a swing rather than the work of the world’s laziest lynch mob.
For example, people use the term "OG" all over the internet, and I think 99% of folks don't even make the connection to "gangster" at all - I think a lot of people just think it's some shorthand for "original" or something. And I don't think I've ever seen "OG" used in any context where it wasn't meant as praise.
Which, you know, leads to situations where a complaint is filed, but eg there's fear of retribution. So maybe they'll fill out an affidavit but don't go downtown for an interview. Or they'll do everything by the book, but because they didn't know the badge number of the cop who physically harmed them, the complaint is dropped. This shit happens all the time.
Hell, I've seen complaints get dropped -- despite videos proof attached to the complaint -- that show cops slamming a kid against a wall and threatening to beat the kid up. Because the person getting slammed against a wall didn't know the badge number. There are probably ten different ways to figure out who the thug cop was, but nope.
Point is -- anonymous complaints are important because they give people with real claims of harm the comfort of reduced exposure to retaliation. Not being able to file a complaint because of genuine fear of retaliation is a threatened voice. Anonymity is important.
If there was video evidence of a cop slamming a kid against a wall, why was this not used to identify the officer? This seems like a pretty outrageous claim that demands specifics - where and when did this happen - and citation of sources.
EDIT: Fixed grammar
But -- I saw the video, I saw the cop's face, I saw his partner's face, and the faces of the cops who were also dispatched, I saw the reports, I've seen the dispatch data, I've seen the assignment sheets, I've seen the car number, the GPS logs, etc etc. It should have been easy, but...
Mind you, the only reason we have these docs is because a FOIA lawsuit that required their release, among about a hundred thousand other complaints, while the city's FOP was pushing to destroy those documents.
Your guess is as good as mine.
It happened in Chicago outside of someone's home after the mom called the cops on her son. Her mom was the person who filed the complaint.
These stories are everywhere. https://cpdp.co is a good place to start looking.
The machine protects itself.
Academic types and teachers are some of the most agreeable and easily bullied people on the planet. They’ve already been severely gouged out of payment for the vast majority of the value they provide by administrators. The only real reason for that is personality profile. Colleges and schools get virtually all of their real value from high quality teachers. If teachers were less agreeable and less easily bullied by bureaucrats they’d have kicked the vast majority of the admins out by now.
Professors give their lives and turn down lots of money they could be earning on different high intelligence career tracks to teach students in classes where you’re lucky if only 50% are ungrateful, disrespectful and/or incompetent. They do that because they genuinely love teaching and mentoring and research/learning, even if only a fraction of their students absorb it. A lot of them also do it because they have a kind hearted but soft-spined personality profile that’s never left the Alma Mater.
The profession doesn’t have a power tripping cop like problem, at least for the majority of teachers. And the types of professors that do go on power trips often turn classes into cults and use their students as weapons. Look at Evergreen.
These kinds of anonymous complaints are just another tool for the types of bullies that have already destroyed a lot of the value of the university to get student followers to use against people they don’t like, and a tool for immature students (which colleges are full of, since the main impetus of college is to guide young adults to intellectual maturity) to attack their professors on a whim with zero consequence.
I don’t see any world in which they don’t do way more harm than good.
professor rape for years "complaints" "ignored"
[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2022/06/19/a-stanford-professor-se...
Consider the population of rapists. Who are you more likely feeling safe complaining about: 1) A professor 2) A cop 3) A powerful politician 4) A gangbanger 5) An unhinged uncle
Consider the population of false rape accusers. Are they more likely to be: 1) An immature college student relatively new to determining sexual boundaries marinating in ideological literature that considers looking at someone the wrong way rape 2) A drug addict, prostitute, or other person a cop typically runs into 3) A regular person that knows the abuser has relationships to prosecutors 4) A person with good reason to fear for their life if they report 5) A person who has to deal with family betrayal if they report.
Between the administrative bureaucracy obsessed with student safety, the often rich and well connected protective parents propping up the school, and the often nerdy and agreeable nature of professors, professors are also probably some of the safest people to accuse of rape (rightly or wrongly) on the planet.
Still I get a very "The Crucible" vibes from the whole thing.
Stanford is a community. All members of the community should have a base amount of trust* in all others. If you cannot countenance such a bargain, then one should leave the community.
* a reasonable criticism of the wokes, is that they have no trust in anyone and all mis-steps by members of the patriarchy or those in power are actions of an evil person or cabal; and never merely a mistake or misunderstanding.
So instead of asking a student reading "Mein Kampf" what they are studying and what they have learned thus far from Adolf Hitler's autobiography, we can get along better by reporting them anonymously as a possible Nazi.
As a citizen of post-communist country, I would never expect something like that coming from West. This system and behavior of snitching for party was something that brutally destroyed trust in society and we are still learning.
After over 30 years we have still huge snitching. For example during covid, reporting a suspicion of breaking chaotic regulations, that changed every week was most common call to police. Usually by people who was locked at home with bottle of alcohol because they would otherwise sit in bar that was closed. They reported every suspect behavior observed from their windows. Like state security was doing during communist regime. Source: My friend is police operator.