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Date: 2012-07-31 02:34 pm (UTC)Yeah, there are quite a LOT of red herrings here.
1. If you make a dumb policy, I think often the correct thing to do IS to change it, even if that IS in response to a particular incident. It's just that in cases like this one, that sends a massively bad message that you may be ALWAYS willing to bend the rules.
2. Zero tolerance is occasionally necessary, but is usually REALLY stupid, even for zero tolerance of bad things. If zero tolerance is accompanied by extra enforcement, that can work, but if it's accompanied by harsh punishemnts instead, the enforcement is usually so inconsistent the punishment has to be massively out of proportion to have ANY effect, which is rather wasteful and can be counterproductive. But it's bad because it creates a double standard of people who are sort of in the gray area and may be caught or not: school children with 3/4 of a nail file ignored, those with 7/8 expelled for life and condemned to a criminal underclass. But none of that matters, because everyone agrees that he DID do what everyone says he did, and (in a minor bright point) no-one's arguing that he shouldn't be excluded at all, they're just arguing about whether fiddling with the sentence is ok or very bad.
3. It's certanily POSSIBLE for someone to be completely innocent of intent or negligance, and for someone else to be harassed by it. Usually there's a sliding scale where even if someone didn't know, they SHOULD have known. Occasionally completely by coincidence, somenoe is thrust into a situation whcih is threatening to someone else. Occasionally someone's medical condition does trip someone else's panic button. We have to accept that there are SOME cases of genuine miscommunication, while still pointing out that MOST cases are of people being wilfully ignorant or wilfully malicious, which is totally different to social cluelessness or autistic spectrum handicaps. But again, even though that CAN happen, and some people even think it likely to happen OFTEN, people only seem to be raising it as a theoretical possibility -- no-one seems to suggest that, however nice a person he may be in many respects, he SHOULDN'T have known better.