It is wild to me that the bulk of responses here seem to take how this is being described by the poster at face value.
As well as the question of interfering with registration, he has also gone about this in a way that causes reputational damage (& UW have probably caused their own, but that's not necessarily relevant here), which I cant imagine they'll take that kindly either.
But I work in a public university in the EU, so my understanding of how these institutions probably operate is likely a little skewed.
Probably pent up rage w.r.t. beurocracy we've all experienced in college?
I agree with you that it seems that there might be something missing from the story.
The standard response and advice of talking to a lawyer I think is still good and stands regardless of how full or truthful the OPs account of the situation is.
I don't personally think that most university staff in the US are out to get people in this way either, so either there is something about the story we are missing, or this is a really big deal and this particular university is out of control.
My experience in university in the US was never this dramatic and I didn't see actions like this taken (but I also never constructed a project of this nature that is directly related to the university beurocracy).
In other words, this is kind of weird in a US context too and I feel the same weirdness about it that you are probably feeling viewing from the EU.
UW has had some pretty bad issues (e.g. systems lab abuse [1], early-entrance programs [2]). Another program I was in had serious issues such as overworking and threatening student eligibility, such that almost all the leadership involved left for other universities. That was never reported more loudly out of fear of retaliation and sheer exhaustion of the students. That being said, it is a large university with many different actors and most of my experiences here have been positive.
How is he interfering with registration? I assumed all he built was a place to pair students so that they could exchange classes using the university's own system. It seems in principle as much of an interference with the university as a coupon aggregating website is to grocery stores: efficiently spreading information so that people can make better use of the existing resources available to them. In his LinkedIn post, he mentions trying to get read access to courses, not write access.
I like how this is visualised (at least aesthetically) and I appreciate the utility of genre in that it creates expectations, but at the same, it sort of reeks of this feigned complete knowledge of music and this obsession with categorising things that cannot be neatly categorised. The techno section has this 'these are the types I've read about on reddit'-ness to it and the metal section... I remember crunkcore but I really dont understand how it could be in such large text.
I'm only familiar with metal genres, but it doesn't look bad. It's way better than Wikipedia, for example. There are no "gimmick" genres like aliencore, and every style mentioned is distinctive, historically important and accepted by me and the people I interact with. The only thing that surprised me is that first wave of black metal is called "extreme metal" here.
If anything, it's not detailed enough. For a long time I was listening almost exclusively to technical death metal, while for example I don't line brutal death metal at all. These subgenres of death metal (and band self-identification) are very different, and yet here they are all lumped into just "death metal", as far as I can see.
Yup, categories are useful, but when you obsess too much about them, it starts to look like "pigeonholing". Also, in my experience the most interesting musicians/bands are those that can't be easily categorized...
As well as the question of interfering with registration, he has also gone about this in a way that causes reputational damage (& UW have probably caused their own, but that's not necessarily relevant here), which I cant imagine they'll take that kindly either.
But I work in a public university in the EU, so my understanding of how these institutions probably operate is likely a little skewed.
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