The University of Washington has agreed to pay $600,000 to resolve a high-profile First Amendment lawsuit brought by computer science professor Stuart Reges, who was disciplined after including a parody land acknowledgment in a course syllabus.
The settlement, announced Thursday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), follows a December ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that found university officials violated Reges’ academic freedom rights by retaliating against his speech and engaging in viewpoint discrimination.
“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,” Reges said in a statement Thursday. He added that he hopes his protest helps reverse “a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia.”
Under the agreement, UW agreed to pay $600,000 to FIRE to cover damages, legal fees, and costs. The settlement prohibits the university from taking further adverse action against Reges or removing the parody statement from his syllabi in perpetuity. While the appeal was pending, UW also rescinded and replaced Executive Order 31, the anti-harassment policy used during the investigation.
The dispute began in January 2022 after the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering recommended that faculty include a statement acknowledging Coast Salish Indigenous lands in their syllabi.
Reges, a teaching professor who has been at the school since 2004, opposed the policy. Instead, he included a parody invoking philosopher John Locke’s labor theory of property to claim Indigenous groups held “almost none” of the land occupied by the university.
UW officials responded by censoring the parody from Reges’ course syllabus, opening a yearlong disciplinary investigation under an anti-harassment policy, and creating a competing “shadow” section of his course so students could opt out of taking his class.
Although the university ultimately declined to formally discipline Reges, officials warned him that repeating the statement could trigger further punishment. Reges sued the UW in 2022, and while a U.S. District Court initially sided with the university, a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, ruling that student discomfort cannot justify retaliating against a professor’s speech on matters of public concern.
Reges’ lawsuit named top university leadership as defendants, including then-UW President Ana Mari Cauce, Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska, Vice Director Dan Grossman, and College of Engineering Dean Nancy Allbritton. Current UW President Robert J. Jones is named in the final agreement.
The Ninth Circuit panel’s decision established that university teaching materials like course syllabi are protected academic speech, setting a binding First Amendment precedent across public higher education institutions in the Western U.S.
The University of Washington provided the following statement to GeekWire:
“The University of Washington maintains that we acted appropriately, and this settlement is in no way an admission of any wrongdoing. Given the Ninth Circuit’s 2-1 decision overturning the federal district court’s decision in favor of the University, a settlement agreement was the most reasonable option due to the attorney fees and costs that would have resulted from the Ninth’s Circuit’s decision. Prof. Reges has retained his faculty position and continued teaching throughout this process, and his status with the UW remains unchanged.”
Reges remains an active faculty member. Under the terms of the deal, he is free to include the Locke property statement on future course materials without administrative interference.
Read the full settlement agreement here.
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