a couple of comments on this from a mere bystander:
“we do not feel this is the relevant or appropriate venue to discuss anonymous accusations from a former intern(s) without first discussing them privately”
this is how gossip works
also confused because the original commenter says that they were not involved:
“I can’t share any specifics because anything specific was told to me in confidence; I also have no way of knowing whether the things I’ve heard were exaggerated. Additionally, a lot of what I was told I remember only vaguely. Given that none of the people wronged spoke up, it’s not clear that I should (due to concerns about the reliability of secondhand knowledge, for example).”
“especially given the personal issues of the ex-interns involved”
this seems disingenuous to me, esp b/c you could’ve chosen not to say this
“the fact that every organization has disgruntled former interns/employees”
for small orgs (ie # of employees and contractors < 30), I think this is just false.
I partially agree that even small orgs will likely have someone who’s disgruntled if you ask them, I think this is just not true about having a number of people who complain about it unprovoked or warn others (as seems to be the case here)
“who we have verifiable evidence we paid as much as we committed to.”
fwiw, this could still be consistent with the main comment
1. ”...not just publicly report any gossip that they’ve heard.”
Gossip is cheap. Gossip is noisy. This is common knowledge to our social protocol. Besides, I would rather a norm of gossip and claims about orgs in public— at least here where you can address it— than gossip in private
Secondly, such a norm would drastically discourage useful gossip because it becomes so much more expensive to share. - Alternatively, gossip could be cheap and we could all acknowledge how noisy it can be.
Third, a trouble with gossip is that there’s an evaporative cooling effect: once you get put off by something/someone, you don’t engage with that org/person anymore, and so you stop collecting hard evidence of misbehavior. This is the reasonable thing to do— and makes ‘due diligence’ impossible.
2. “This is a good a reason to hear both sides before publicly accusing somebody of something. ”
I think this is absolutely unrealistic, per above
3. “and this creates an echo chamber where it can appear that there were more disgruntled ex-employees than actually existed”
For the record, though this effects your organization, such comments are not nonlinear’s problem. How to evaluate the truth and applicability of gossip like this is the problem of anyone who hears it. We all know how inaccurate gossip can be.
4. “might hold an opinion about something even after that problem was fixed”
this is a good point, though again see #3