Customizing author_link, FERPA concerns

With our classroom blogs, our professors have FERPA-related concerns about exposing the identities of student bloggers (FERPA == Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).

Our workaround has been to allow students to choose a pseudonymous nickname. However, the author links in the entry meta sections expose their login usernames, which can be traced to individual students quite easily. My temporary “security through obscurity” workaround there is to hide the link with CSS, which also hides the author name.

I was able to use the author_link filter inside of a plugin to at least blank out the URL (this changes the URL to the permalink URL on single post pages).

add_filter( 'author_link', 'remove_author_link', 10, 3);
function remove_author_link($link, $author_id, $author_nicename) {
   $link = '';
   return $link;
}

However, there is still a title attribute that says “View all posts by” and the display name. Is there a way to remove that title attribute, or even better strip out the link tag completely, but leave the name?

I would prefer to do this via a plugin function, rather than create a child theme for each theme that the professors are using. Also, some themes, like the Minileven theme in Jetpack 1.8 do not lend themselves to child themes.