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The University of Washington quietly agreed to pay $600,000 to settle a First Amendment lawsuit brought by Professor Stuart Reges after administrators punished him for including a parody of a campus “land acknowledgment” on his syllabus. The payout, and a federal appeals court ruling backing Reges, should be a wake-up call to every university that thinks student discomfort is a license to punish faculty speech.
What the settlement actually did
The settlement gives Professor Reges $600,000 to cover damages and legal fees, stops any further adverse action against him, and lets him keep the disputed parody in his course materials. The Ninth Circuit had already held that UW’s investigation and retaliation violated his First Amendment and academic-speech rights. The university’s official line — that settling is no admission of wrongdoing — is the usual fig leaf. Pay up, move on, and pretend the law didn’t sting.
Why this matters for free speech on campus
This is more than one professor’s victory. The appeals court opinion and the settlement reinforce a simple rule: public universities cannot discipline teachers just because some students are offended. Course syllabi are a form of academic speech. If administrators can police what professors write on a syllabus, they can choke off debate, mockery, and honest disagreement — everything a university is supposed to protect.
Land acknowledgements and the new campus orthodoxy
Land acknowledgements were supposed to be respectful gestures. Too often they’ve become ritualized tests of ideological loyalty. Substitute a satirical line and administrators respond with investigations, apologies to students, and course splits so students can avoid the professor. Then taxpayers get the bill. Call it “inclusion” if you like; the result looks a lot like enforced conformity, backed by policy and, until now, administrative muscle.
Reges and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression deserve credit for holding UW to account. The settlement should nudge other public universities to stop weaponizing harassment and speech codes. If colleges want to be places of learning rather than ideological book clubs, they should stop treating disagreement as a disciplinary offense. The money paid in this case is small compared with the cost of a free campus lost to bureaucratic censorship — but it’s a useful reminder that free speech still has defenders, and the courts can enforce the rules when administrators forget them.
