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Comment by keneda7 | Hacker News Reader

But the reverse is also true. Professors have the power to ruin a students career before it even starts.

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.

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> 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).

You hit the nail on the head but you did not actually say it. The current system is NOT part of the legal system. We are not arguing about the legal system. We are arguing about the administrative system these administrators/professors put in the place. The exact ones ruining students lives on a whim.

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?

> 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.

Those are pretty damning statistics to be honest.

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.

Seems like whistelblowing by teachers prevents tens of thousands of cases of child abuse--otherwise how will little Billy's twelve consecutive black eyes get reported? And yeah, a lot of times little Billy just face plants into his toys and sometimes child services does too much or too little but it is better than nothing.

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.

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