For LW1, the shitty communication is a red flag and the fact he wants the money paid to him is a red flag, and it's probably some fuckery, but in a lot of cases having a second person move into a reslife coordinator apartment on campus who is not legally married to the person employed by the university does mean that the second person needs to pay rent, because they don't have the legal relationship of being employed by the university and the apartment is not part of their employment benefits so they are legally a tenant and "tenants that don't pay rent" can be A Problem, legal and liability-wise (whereas the person for whom housing is part of the employment benefit is not a tenant for the purposes of landlord/tenant law because employment-related housing is exempt from a lot of that).

The fact the dude wants the rent paid to him could be shady, or it could just be "they're going to be deducting it from my paycheck so you need to pay it back to me". She'd have to check with the university itself to figure out which -- but if it's at the point of checking the dude's employers' policies about this stuff, it's probably a good idea to just bail.