So you entered some sort of competition and were told by a professor (?) to modify your entry in some way to conform to that professor's understanding of the rules or guidelines. Or your entry was disqualified as it did not meet the parameters of the competition. Others disagree. That isn't even remotely in violation of equal opportunity. If they prevented you from entering because it was only open to those of another race, or religion, that would be a different story. You would need to go through your Title IX Coordinator first, but you might have legal recourse. If it is just a difference of opinion over the interpretation of a competition's rules, that does not leave you with legal recourse. You can discuss it with the Dean or Provost, but I'm not sure what you expect anyone to do about it 6 months later. Even if you had remained in the competition or not modified your project, you were not guaranteed to win.
Thank you for you reply.
Unfortunately, that is not what happened. They told me that I cannot present that important part of my presentation, and didn't let me to modify it. They were staff, and then deans, not my professors. When I asked why, they told me that their understanding of their rules is unquestionable, and I have violated the regulations. They changed the meaning of a word and interpreted reguation in the opposite way of what was written on the regulation file (I used something that was directly mentioned to be fine, but they changed its meaning to another thing). It was shocking for me. Their interpretation was called insane (or similar) by many people to whom I discussed the case, and their decision as unfair. They violated their own regulations, and told me that I don't have the right to question it. I emailed them and explained that why their interpretation is not correct and absolutely unpredictable, and asked them to let me modify my presentation, but again, they suppressed me and even invited me not to participate. When I asked for a logical discussion based on that regulation and the meaning of the word, they told me that "logic is about philosophy, and we don't discuss it here", and also "talking about the meaning of a word is about semantics and we don't discuss it".
At the end of the meeting that I had about it with our ombuds to discuss the issue and try to address it again at university, he told me that "you will win" (the case) because first, we investigated the truth in that meeting. There is no way to justify what they did. Later in a grievance meeting, the grievance officer and dean only suppressed me and told me that " we are not going to parse a word" while I was accused of the violation of the regulation because they parsed a word in an incorrect, weird and unpredictable way, which was a clear evidence that they were not familiar with the meaning of their regulations, so they used it to be unjust towards me. Months later, I was also told in a sympathetic way by one of the high-ranked employees (who worked directly with provost) in a meeting that I asked for to discuss my complaint and learn about my rights and learn about how to make an official complaint that "even if you are right, unfortunately you don't have the right to due process (maybe on campus) because it is not about your academic progress". When I sent all my explanations and evidence by email to office of the compliance and audit months ago to ask about my rights to due process and learn about what to do, they stayed silent, and then again, sent me to a loop.
In the following link, there is more information about their baseless and shocking interpretation:
An on-click embedded audio file vs Animation in Powerpoint?
