Yale Students Tangle With University Over Website

Yale shut down a website that offered a better, more user-friendly version of the university’s online course catalog, helping to turn a local campus issue into something of a civil rights cause.

Now, after a few days of controversy, a similar tool is up and running, and it appears to be Yale that has gotten a schooling. University administrators said they were concerned that the site was available to people who were not Yale students, that it gave undue prominence to numerical ratings without including descriptive evaluations that went with them, and that it infringed on Yale trademarks. Designers Peter Xu and Harry Yu, twin brothers at the university, offered to make those fixes, but instead got notice to shut down the site. To Mr. Xu and Mr. Yu, that seemed like a violation of free speech -- a right held dear by both academics and Internet activists, many of whom rallied to the brothers’ cause as The Yale Daily News, The Washington Post and other news organizations reported on the shutdown. Brad Rosen, a lecturer in Yale’s computer science department who teaches “Law, Technology and Culture,” said the debate got at a central tension of contemporary life. “Different stakeholders have different assumptions about how information is going to flow,” he said.