Stuart Reges, a non-tenured computer science and engineering teaching professor at the University of Washington (UW), ran afoul of the institution after parodying land acknowledgments.
The University initially punished Reges. Now he is getting a huge payday.
Reges has described himself as having participated in three movements that were unpopular in their academic contexts: gay rights, drug-policy reform, and opposition to what he calls the “equity agenda.”
In his 2018 Quillette essay, “Why Women Don’t Code,” he argued that interest and preference differences, not just discrimination, help explain gender gaps in computing. While the article led to student petitions and later disputes over his contract and course assignments, it was his mocking of a leftist ritual, the invocation of a ‘land acknowledgment,’ that caused left-wing academia to crack.
Following a 2021 email to faculty criticizing land acknowledgment statements, in January of 2022 he put a parody statement on his syllabus, invoking Locke’s labor theory of property: that the Coast Salish people could claim historical ownership of almost none of the land UW occupies.
Reges wrote in his syllabus: “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 department ordered it removed, opened a harassment investigation, created a “shadow” section of his required course, and took other steps he described as retaliation.
He sued with backing from FIRE.
“University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them,” said Reges. “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”
A Ninth Circuit panel later held that UW officials violated his First Amendment rights through viewpoint discrimination and retaliation.
FIRE now reports that UW has settled, paying Reges $600,000 and agreeing not to remove the parody statement from his syllabi or take further adverse action over it.
The payout comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held administrators liable under the First Amendment for retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.
Today’s settlement concludes the legal battle that began with a 2022 lawsuit by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on Reges’s behalf. Besides the monetary settlement, the agreement stipulates that the university cannot take any further action against Reges. While Reges’s appeal was pending, UW also rescinded and replaced the vague antiharassment policy used to punish the professor for his speech.
“I am deeply grateful to FIRE for this legal victory which will remind public universities that they are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of their students, faculty, and staff,” said Reges. “More importantly, I hope that my protest can help reverse a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia and help to convince them that instead of ‘protecting’ students from controversial ideas, they should be helping them to learn how to cope with disagreement. Only then can we heal the deep divisions that confront us today.”
Ad block users: Some site features may not work correctly while an ad blocker is enabled, because they break scripts and content this website depends on. If you can’t see comments below, for example, please disable your ad blocker.
