UW Pays Professor $600K, Allows “Parody Land Acknowledgment”

The University of Washington has agreed to pay a computer science teaching professor $600,000 for damages and legal fees and pledged not to force him to remove a “parody land acknowledgment statement” from his syllabi.

The settlement ends the lawsuit Stuart Reges filed against the university more than four years ago, alleging it violated his First Amendment rights for mocking UW’s recommended land acknowledgement. The majority on a panel of judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in December and May in Reges’s favor, saying Reges “experienced adverse employment actions, including a lengthy disciplinary investigation and reprimand, because of his protected speech.”

“The speech was protected speech, not government speech, because Reges spoke in his own capacity as a professor, and not on behalf of his employer, and he unquestionably spoke on a matter of public concern,” the majority wrote. UW spokesperson Victor Balta said the university decided to settle after that court loss to avoid further legal costs.

“Defendants agree not to remove from Plaintiff’s current and future syllabi, in perpetuity, his parody land acknowledgment statement ‘I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington,’” the settlement agreement says. The university further agreed to refrain from “pursuing any investigation, creating competing or ‘shadow’ sections of his courses, or withholding future salary increases” due to the statement or complaints about it.

Reges used the parody to protest the boilerplate land acknowledgment that UW encouraged—but didn’t require—professors to use. UW then amended his online syllabus to remove Reges’s parody land acknowledgment and offered an alternative section of the class he was teaching, to which Reges said about 30 percent of his students transferred.

Gabe Walters, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression who represented Reges, said in a news release that “reasonable people can disagree about the value of land acknowledgments. What’s not up for debate is academic freedom.”

In an email, Balta said the university “maintains that we acted appropriately, and this settlement is in no way an admission of any wrongdoing.”

“Prof. Reges has retained his faculty position and continued teaching throughout this process,” Balta said.