You’re right! Sister Damien Marie is turning over in her grave right now. She’d rap me on the knuckles if she were alive. 
Happens on SMDB all the time. Female/Some Male in Thread Titles You might even say it’s pervasive.
Being a woman, I tend to the notice the “female” threads. In almost all cases, “Woman” (or appropriate variant) would have worked just fine. It’s a form of de-personalization. Like saying, “you people” or why do “they” do that. It’s annoying.
Those examples don’t work - at all. You, your daughter and her husband have much bigger problems if you use either one of those sentences to describe family relationships. As a matter of fact, we could dissect your chosen form as being more offensive and insinuating than anything a reasonable person would use in common speech without some serious implications involved.
The real world statement should be something like “James is my son-in-law married to my daughter Sara.”
I use the terms male and female all the time even on this board with no complaints directed at me because they are sometimes the only age neutral terms that fit some statements or questions. There is nothing offensive at all about them in the vast majority of contexts and they are often the best choice.
With regards to the syllabus wording: have you guys been in a college class? If I took the wording in all the various class syllabi I’ve read at face value college would have been miserable. A syllabus is a terse pseudo-legal document that always sounds far, far, far scarier and stricter than it actually is. There have been courses that turned out being extremely engaging, fun, and relatively painless, where the syllabus made the instructor and their “extremely stringent” policies sound like Vlad the Impaler.
Instructors (professors especially) love to strike fear into their students hearts for the first day, and explain that the course is Not Easy™ and have this syllabus with super strict and scary rules. Maybe throw in a rant about “students treating degrees like a business transaction instead of a learning experience” for good measure. Classes are rarely that scary, and if they are it’s because the teacher was already an unrepentant asshole or has a fetish for failing students.
In fact, I TAd an Ethics in Computer Science course that had similar language in the thesis that sounded really scary and strict, but the person teaching the course was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. If someone made an honest mistake in language she was very nice in correcting them unless they were being a total asshole.
The whole “may fail or face expulsion” thing is almost certainly a get out of jail free card in case someone keeps being a contrary asshole and disrupting everything.
Using male and female is perfectly valid though. Just like referring to a person as a man or woman. I’m surprised that professor tolerates speciesism and allows people to be called people.
The more important question is why are people wasting time and money to study something that won’t qualify them to man, sorry, person the cash register at a Starbucks?
It is a class, not a major.
I avoid that linguistic minefield altogether and just use the neutral term “wench”. 
Indeed. The OP somehow neglected to mention the original source of this controversy–Campus Reform. Read the latest developments in this story–then find out about the “Christian prof fired for mentioning God” and “Atheist organization going after college football chaplains.”
Campus Reform is a program of the Leadership Institute, “training conservative activists, students, and leaders since 1979.”
My wife’s been a University Professor for a decade, I assure you she has never intended to scare or discourage her students. Believe it or not there are a legion of young people every semester willing to whine, fight and threaten to get the grades they didn’t work hard enough to earn. The course is laid out in stark terms on day one to protect the teacher from the storm of bullshit that will rain down at the end of every course when grades are posted.
Just one anecdote masquerading as a data point.
Isn’t the OP basically a souped-up version of “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?!”
This is a perfect example of denying the experience of a member of a disadvantaged group.
Referring to literal definitions, ignoring the context, discounting the fact that people in different circumstances can actually live under different conditions even in a nominally equal society, and ignoring the reality of the privileges of the dominant group.
“Why can’t I say ‘nigger’ when rap lyrics say it?”
“Why is it just ‘black lives matter’ and not ‘all lives matter’?”
“Why can’t there be a NAAWP?”
“What, the acceptable terminology changed again? Why can’t they just make up their minds what they want to be called?”
When you take the position that “‘Males’ and ‘females’ are neutral terms to me therefore there’s no good reason for you to object to them,” this is just another way of saying, like all those examples above, that “your point of view doesn’t matter to me.”
“Louis Brandeis was a famous Jewish lawyer.”
“Louis Brandeis was a famous Jew lawyer.”
Would you argue that those two sentences are identical? Or do you think that one sentence carries a connotation that’s absent in the other?
That’s silly. Of course your point of view matters but it doesn’t matter more than anyone else’s and that includes those who don’t have a problem with any of your examples or the word “male.” Just because some assume they are special and assert it vehemently it does not make it so.
I would agree that the two aren’t identical. But I’m willing to bet you can’t find an example where “female” and “woman” change a sentence to that degree, since neither term is remotely pejorative.
Jew as an adjective can be a pejorative with a real, legit negative meaning (largely, I expect, because it calls to mind the verb form of the word “Jew” as in “Kyle really Jewed down Cartman over that action figure”).
I would like to see a female/woman example where the two words dramatically change meaning. Not subtle nuance of the shade of the penumbra of a tone of the sentence. Where it actually changes the meaning of a sentence.
Ethel Merman was a brash, annoying female singer.
Ethel Merman was a brash, annoying woman singer.
Either statement, wrong or right, is identical in tone and meaning to the other.
And uses female as an adjective…
Do you seriously not get the difference between
“I went to the bar and there were a lot of women there” and
“I went to the bar and there were a lot of females there” ?
Hey, Champion: Should you stop beating your wife? 
Other than the “female” one sounding awkward*, I tell you with 100% seriousness, I see no difference.
*Awkward in the sense that it makes the speaker sound like an overly precise pedant. Think Sheldon, from Big Bang Theory. “I went to the bar and there were a number of homo sapiens with a XX chromosomal pair” is the exact same thing as your two examples, except it makes the speaker sound like an even bigger pedant. None of the three have any negative connotations to the ladies there.
Using “women,” “females,” or indeed “ladies” each give a different connotative tone to such a remark. “Women” is the term that identifies whole people, while acknowledging their gender. “Females” makes genitalia paramount, individual personhood minimal. Consider: would the person who used “females” knowingly include trans women in the description?
Who knows whether they would? They may just be a pedantic twit (Sheldon on “Big Bang Theory”).
In any case, we’re getting far afield of my original question which was: find a usage where we’re talking of a substantive difference. I’m not talking about microscopic shades of tones of shadows of connotations between “female” and “woman”. Show me two otherwise identical sentences where there’s at least as large a difference as in Miller’s “Jew-Lawyer”/“Jewish-Lawyer” example. That’s the bare minimum (and Jew-Lawyer vs Jewish Lawyer is just barely on the “there’s a real difference” side of the line) it’ll take to satisfy me that there’s a difference.
I think that example has been given, and with respect, if you don’t see the difference in the “females” case as more than microscopic, it sounds like you’re just not as sensitive as in the “Jew” case.
In my experience and estimation, the set of men who say “females” strongly overlap the set of those who would (should the subject come up) make a point of saying that trans women are not “real” women/females.