-- if you wish to promote a specific vision of gentle relations. However, if you're after information, then you should choose whatever is best for scientific economy. Maybe that takes you down a gentle path, and maybe it doesn't.

It's just a heuristic along the lines of Occam's Razor. Competent malice is less likely than incompetence, all else being equal. Normative motivations are irrelevant.

> ignorance

Indifference in this case. Anyone could have remembered or imagined what the day of a student is. They just didn't care