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

Their response on face value doesn't make sense. But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer to "why didn't you think of this?" If that is the case then it makes a lot more sense and is retaliatory behavior. You can't undo their insecurity and loss of face. Therefore you should not expect a reasonable response.

Act accordingly.

Educate yourself on your options. This is why people are recommending a consultation with a lawyer.

Reach out to your friends and contacts in the University. Leverage existing ones to make new ones. Others may be in a stronger position to put pressure on the registrar's office.

Use the news and media to further ratchet up pressure.

Stay positive. Fon't stoop to their level, it won't help you.

And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly all companies stop caring about credentials. Just get your foot in the door somewhere and shine, that's what I did and it worked out for me 26 years later.

Hang in there.

A college like UW may have sports revenue on order of $300M, much of which goes to the university, and means students may pay less than if there were no sports. Dig carefully through UW finances, which are usually public record. Paying a coach whose program is a massive profit center enough to have a team of quality enough to land bigger TV deals may be a financial benefit.

Seconding this. It's entirely likely the registrar is this petty and boneheaded. It's less likely that their boss is though, this is a really bad look for the university.

Personally I would find a way to contact the president of the university (possibly through university PR, who also care about public image) and simply state,

"The registrar is asking me for quid pro quo, that I develop software for them in exchange to restore my ability to register for classes."

and include a screenshot of that communication.

Additionally, consider "agreeing" to their demands, if they will unblock you immediately. Register for classes, then reneg on your half of the "deal". Even if they then retaliate, that strengthens your position (a) that they are engaging in quid pro quo, and (b) that there's no valid reason that you should be barred from registering for courses, and also buys you some time.

My former institution tried that for a few years - nobody actually obeyed it, but at the time I went there, they still made you pay a separate registration fee on arrival each year for internet access in the dorms, so they didn't put in wireless APs there when they covered the campus, and IIRC they tried to use Cisco's "kill nearby APs that aren't ours" setting before the FCC pointed out that would get them shoved in a locker.

Nobody actually got punished, that I recall, for bringing a wireless router, but that was the nominal policy for a number of years before someone successfully got it into the annual tuition rollup so it stopped being necessary.

To my recollection from when I left the school years after that, though, there still wasn't campus wifi reliably accessible in the dorms. (Of course, half of them also didn't have reliable air conditioning in muggy humid summers and would blow breakers if you tried putting window units in, so...priorities.)

That's what bothers me the most about this. The reason this is even an issue in the first place is because universities are aren't adequately providing what the students want.

So you want to study, say, engineering.

First you have to apply and get admitted to the university, and many people aren't admitted. The acceptance rate I can find for UW is 54% in-state, 46% out of state.

Then the university tells you that if you want to study engineering, you have to study a lot of other non-engineering things it feels like you should study. All of which are pretty costly and time consuming.

You might have to take courses in things you already know, because there are few courses you can test out of and the universities limit how many credits it can bring over.

Then on top of this, the universities don't provide anywhere near enough adequate quality classes for students, which is the whole reason why there's this level of demand in the first place.

Not only do they not provide enough, they know they don't provide enough, so their response is since it's "really competitive" they need to be "really strict about making sure that no one had an edge over anyone else." It's not about making sure students needs are being met, even for classes that the university is forcing on them. It's about restricting students, so that they suffer a roughly equal amount from the university's failures.

The attitude of the universities seems to be that since they're the only game in town, students have to suffer through all of this. Imagine a system where students could take classes from anywhere they want, and then could get a degree just by passing assessments at the university. I imagine the number of people paying huge amounts of money for inadequate classes would plummet.