I partially agree with the university's reasoning on this; displaying course ratings like it's a food menu is disencouraging thought, not something you expect from an academic environment, and it can't have a good outcome regarding course selection. They just should have found a better way to combat that instead of brute force.
This is key to say: this is more than a freedom of speech (or freedom of entrepreneurship) issue. It's a question of whether college classes should become commodities distinguished only by convenience of access (e.g. scheduling) and a rating from prior consumers of the class/professor. It probably doesn't help that the period during which students check out classes is called "shopping"...
There's something deeply conservative (in a grumpy old-school sense of the word) about trying to preserve a non-metrics based view of an education... Facebook's early days is, of course, also a subtext to this. FB was, of course, built by a comp-sci undergrad at an elite college who became fabulously wealthy by hacking friendships into data structures. Are we rooting for similar hacks going straight into the pedagogy?
I agree that interface decisions are political. If you allow students to sort by workload, you're sending the wrong message about academics.
Or at least what a minority (I, included) believes academics to be about. The cynic in me is OK with YBB+ and its food menu ethos: most of the academic system has been turned into an exchange already, so might as well be publicly honest about it. That way, real scholarly students can avoid places like Yale at the undergraduate level, and go to places that actually still know what real education means.
