I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

I have several friends on the administrative side at Universities. The two things you have to realize is that there are an incredible number of administrative staff at Universities and they're extremely territorial. You rocked someone's boat and they got upset. They have a lot of time on their hands because there are so, so many people in administration. Now they're coming after you like it's their job.

I think you're doing the right thing by publicizing this far and wide. Stay calm, cool, and stick to the facts as tightly as possible. When this gets picked up across social media and news media it will start to become a problem for other people on the administrative side of the university who are also territorial (about PR/image) and will take it as their job to fix it.

So be loud, but polite.

Stop posting anything publicly until you’ve retained and consulted with an attorney.

You may wish to consider deleting this comment. You can always repost it later after you lawyer up.

Haha. The programmer ananlysts left the Ellucian swagger documentation up and public, and someone was embarrassed.

If you had managed to build this system during my time at UW, I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project. The class and reservation system there was (and presumably is?) incredibly broken.

I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a free schedule to hold the class for you. In you're in a frat, great. If you're a bit of an introvert that lives off campus, you're shit out of luck.

I imagine UW is fully aware of this, I cant believe that it's still so much an issue that they felt the jeed to expell you for even having the gall to demo an idea. Absolutely appalling

He wasn't disciplined for building an app or fetching data.

He was disciplined for blatantly trying to "hack" (in the YC sense, in UW's view) the registration process:

https://registrar.washington.edu/winter-2025-registration-ch...

"Know that trading, selling, or buying open spots is a breach of the Registration Tampering Abuse Policy. Consequences include referral to the Student Code of Conduct process, a Registrar’s Hold on your record, and potential diploma withholding for graduating students until the conduct process is complete."

https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-proce...

"Registration Abuse The registration system is provided for the sole express purpose for students to register themselves into sections. Any use of the registration system other than for this purpose is considered abuse of the system. Such abuse includes, but is not limited to, buying or selling one’s seat in a class, holding seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking."

Disclaimer: I am making no claim about the ethical validity of this policy, and I don't know how well the policy is communicated to students. I am not commenting on the allegation that the University demanded free labor in exchange for not-expelling OP.