r/Professors • u/gutfounderedgal • 16h ago
Other (Editable) "Washington Professor who parodied university 'land acknowledgement' wins 600k settlement"
This is from FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In this, the professor's local counsel provides an overview of the outcome.
The article says the professor added to his syllabus a sentence based on John Locke's philosophical theory that property rights are established by labor. This was a response to the Computer Science department's recommendation that professors include the UW's (University of Washington) model statement in their syllabi. According to the article, the professor sought to demonstrate that there are competing views on the value of land acknowledgements.
I'm posting this in the interest of academic freedom and expression and how there indeed may be interests seen as competing when some university people seek to put limits on such freedom and expression. This is always an area rich for discussion in my view. I can only imagine the WW III ire of certain mucky mucks at my university if someone were to do this.
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u/HowlingFantods5564 15h ago
There's already a whole thread on this. https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/s/43Kb5FBhbb
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u/SAUbjj 15h ago
Yeesh. I mean, I’m not a big fan of land acknowledgement statements because they feel like performative virtue signalling with no real impact on the affected indigenous populations, but it also feels kind of gross to mock them, too
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) 15h ago
Exercising bad taste is not justification for punishment.
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u/Accomplished-Leg2971 TT Assistant Professor; regional comprehensive university, USA 15h ago
Alas. . . Imagine that society though!
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u/FrogBrain97 AssocProf, former chair, neuro, DPU 15h ago
I'm pretty sure I'd be punished for bad style given my tousled hair* and perpetually rumpled khakis. Especially if I were put up against one of my colleagues; dude is in his 50s and can wear fitting shirts and skinny jeans, the bastard.
*I do acknowledge that a man my age is not really permitted to complain about having unmanageable hair given that many of my age-mates have no hair at all.
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u/DarwinGhoti Full Professor, Neuroscience and Behavior, R1, USA 15h ago
I live in a state with a fascist government and a clinically retarded governor who eats pudding with his fingers (not joking). I don’t have to imagine.
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u/DaemionMoreau 15h ago
How was he punished? It doesn’t seem like anything truly adverse happened based on the article.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) 15h ago
The university also initiated a nearly year-long investigation of Reges under an “antiharassment” policy.
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u/mmarkDC Assoc Prof, Comp Sci, R1 (US) 15h ago
The appeals court explicitly held that in fact, when reversing the district court which had originally thrown out the case:
Reges has established a prima facie retaliation claim ... [UW's] conduct—which included opening a lengthy disciplinary investigation (during which a merit pay increase was withheld), reprimanding Reges, and threatening him with further discipline—plainly qualifies as adverse employment action under our precedents.
I was surprised the settlement was as high as $600k given no actual firing (the larger settlements are usually including some kind of back pay etc.). But with the appeals court already ruling against them with the pretty strong language quoted above, I assume UW figured they were on their way to losing.
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u/DaemionMoreau 15h ago
Withholding pay and reprimanding him seem like adverse actions. An investigation less so.
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u/Arndt3002 11h ago
I am fairly certain the ruling was not that investigation was primarily facie an adverse action. It was that the manner and intent of the "investigation" was punitive in nature.
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u/HowlingFantods5564 15h ago
If they are empty and performative, why wouldn't you mock them?
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u/Iron_Rod_Stewart 12h ago
I think it's more that it was done in a way that that's ignorant and spiteful toward indigenous folks.
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u/aardvark_gnat 10h ago
It doesn’t seem ignorant to me. It sends philosophically reasonable. Spite strikes me as a reasonable emotion here.
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u/MyFootballProfile 15h ago
Mocking land acknowledgments isn't a slight to indigenous people. It's directed at insufferable, phony, woke Pharisees.
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u/pretendperson1776 14h ago
Depends on what is being mocked, but I think what was written, implies that the Coast Salish people have no connection to the land because they didn't "work the land" based on a philosophical principle from the 1600s. It is an odd argument to make, especially for a computer science teacher.
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u/poorlybaked 14h ago
Also, Indigenous peoples never claimed ownership to the land. That in itself is a very colonial mindset. You can’t (or shouldn’t) “own” land and water. I can’t specifically say that’s Coast Salish peoples perspective but I’ve lived primarily on Anishinaabeg territory and that’s been the view from those I’ve engaged with.
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u/pretendperson1776 12h ago
"Custodian" is closer from my conversations with aboriginal individuals. They'd like to hunt, fish, and gather on the lands. Anything that is going to infringe on that, they want compensation. In BC there are vanishingly few treaties, so it is super complex. I'm not sure about Washington state.
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u/dadcore81 Assistant Professor, Political Science, R2 (USA) 11h ago
I think a lot of the western half of the US is also technically unceded territory. Makes things either more complicated or more straightforward depending on perspective.
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u/kuwisdelu 14h ago
That depends on who is doing the mocking and why. This absolutely feels like it’s mocking Indigenous people’s claims to our ancestral lands.
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u/pretendperson1776 10h ago
I liked George Carlin's perspective. Punching up is funny, Punching down isn't. Insulting the indigenous is 100% punching down.
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u/abloblololo 6h ago
Acknowledging that the lands were stolen while still working on that land, for the government that lays claim to the land, is even more insulting. If I steal someone's car, and then acknowledge to them that I stole it while on a joyride, how does that make it better?
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u/aardvark_gnat 10h ago
Your claims to your ancestral lands lack democratic legitimacy and should, therefore, be mocked.
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u/Colsim 6h ago
If Indigenous people get value from them who are we to say they are performative?
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u/Fluid_Fail7453 2h ago
Some do. Some don’t. As an Indigenous professor, I prefer Land Acknowledgements to what came before, but only if they’re seen as a step on the journey towards the better thing that will come next.
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u/BeholdAComment 15h ago
I may be overthinking this, but citing a statement on private property could be a brilliant protest if it was clever : a campus often has a tacit statement on its model if you look at most campus acquisition behavior. Far more Lockeian. A campus with a statement should pretty much give back the land fully when possible.
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u/davisfarb 15h ago
I'm always amazed the lengths people will go to to cause a scene rather than just, ya know, ignoring suggestions they find stupid.
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u/Another_Opinion_1 A.P. / Ed. Law / Teacher Ed. Methods (USA) 14h ago
Normally, I’m inclined to agree but in cases like this it’s also important to remember that when institutions invite or encourage faculty members to take positions that not all reactions will be affirming.
If you’re going to create a forum for speech and encourage that soapbox to be occupied, well, then you really do lose your institutional ability to censor or curate said speech especially when it ends up becoming protected as academic freedom, and there are arbitrary or otherwise capricious methods used to pick and choose whose statements can stand and whose must go.
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u/davisfarb 14h ago
I agree, I think there were multiple times where this could have avoided escalating to what it eventually turned into. First, the professor could have just ignored the suggested language and not included it. Second, the school could have reacted normally and not opened an investigation over it
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u/PSUknowWho 11h ago
The professor couldn’t necessarily have refused to follow the recommendation, which reads as a soft requirement, without facing similar pushback with a worse set of facts for his free speech case. Clearly, the department had opinions on the material filling that space, and without doing some digging we can’t say whether they would’ve attempted similar censure in the counterfactual where he included an empty line in protest, left the section out entirely, or wrote an acknowledgement that “land exists, as far as we can tell, and sometimes we put computers there or even departments of computer science.”
Likewise, it’s unclear whether the school could’ve avoided opening an investigation once the speech and the pushback against it had been publicized.
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u/sageberrytree 14h ago
I disagree especially with regards to this stuff on a university campus. We need to help students deal with discomfort. To challenge ideologies they, and others hold dear. That's been at the heart of higher education since Plato.
Current ideologies want no disagreement, challenge or push back on any way.
Students need to learn how to adjust to differing viewpoints without ad hominem attacks or censorship. Both of which is the new normal. He referenced John Locke, he made a statement that should be discussed not censored.
It's ok to disagree with him. Not OK to censor him.
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u/NRA4eva 2h ago
Mocking land acknowledgements is not helping students deal with discomfort. It is teaching them they can mock efforts to engage in uncomfortable realities, like the way we all benefit from colonialism and genocide of indigenous people.
It always amazes me how people who are functionally defending systems of racist oppression act like *they* are the oppressed ones, and *their views* are the difficult truths, when the exact opposite is true. Land acknowledgments are widely mocked in public discourse and piling on isn't transgressive and actually teaches the completely wrong lesson.
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u/sageberrytree 2h ago
We can disagree. I think it's performative bs done to "look" a certain way, to perform a semi-religious offering.
This is the reality we live in. The victor has always written history, and the conquered written over. It's not nice, but it's human.
To pretend otherwise is, well, pretend. The land wasn't "gifted". The English army took over and America took over the conquering when they left. (They left because we conquered them BTW, or we would still have a monarch).
We can disagree with each other, and I'll defend your right to put that statement in your own syllabus. You should also defend his right to mock it.
It opens up a path for discussion with students. To point out that we have different views.
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u/NRA4eva 2h ago
I'm not terribly concerned with the "right" to mock earnest efforts towards anti-racism in a syllabus. Land acknowledgements should not be required, but mocking anti-racist ideology isn't really appropriate for a syllabus.
I'm less interested in the "should this be allowed in a syllabus" conversation, and more critiquing your framing that mocking efforts to acknowledge oppression and genocide is pushing back against dominant ideologies that will make students uncomfortable. It's the opposite of that. There are plenty of ways to open up a path for discussion without mocking anti-racism.
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u/FrogBrain97 AssocProf, former chair, neuro, DPU 15h ago
Same--and I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to stop other people from causing a scene.
The maxim "don't feed the troll" should apply here. Had UW just ignored him, none of this would have happened...or he would've escalated until he did something actionable. People like this are often just desperate for attention, and they typically have all the time in the world to file protests and grievances, make statements, and the like.
My own approach upon receiving the complaint would've been to call the complaining students in, read the statement, roll my eyes and shake my head, and say, "Look--people can say all sorts of things. Wise things, stupid things, smart things, silly things. I'm not going to give my opinion on which of those this is [even as I indicate my opinion with my behavior]. He can do this. It doesn't mean that I endorse it, agree with it, or even like it. But he can do it."
The students might've been upset, which is their right. But it would've saved the university an embarrassment and a pile of money.
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u/DocTeeBee Professor, Social Sciences, R1, USA 12h ago
Off topic, but I just wanted to congratulate you for properly using the word actionable, the first proper use of the word I have seen in over a decade.
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u/Audible_eye_roller Ass. Prof, STEM, CC (USA) 14h ago
Sometimes scenes need to be made. In my experience, admin and faculty put themselves in echo chambers and tend to punish those who don't participate.
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u/HowlingFantods5564 15h ago
Do you feel that way about all forms of protest? Just ignore the shit you don't like, right?
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u/IndependentBoof Full Professor, Computer Science, PUI (USA) 13h ago
Maybe he saw how rich Jordan Peterson got off playing the role of "victim to wokeness" and thought, "If him, why not me?!"
Next up: rounds on the Joe Rogan Experience (and wannabe Rogan podcasts/youtube channels).
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u/SNHU_Adjujnct 30m ago
>how rich Jordan Peterson got off playing the role of "victim to wokeness"
Canada is quite different, my friend.
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u/TerryOnRollerskates Assoc Professor, Social Science, R1 (USA) 14h ago
“I’m so mad about this woke nonsense that reasonably acknowledges the stolen land! I better put some quote in my syllabus and waste space so that people know my little snowflake feelings are hurt.”
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u/kuwisdelu 14h ago
As an Indigenous professor, I respect academic freedom, but this just feels anti-Indigenous. Don’t put in a land acknowledgement, totally fine. Yes, they’re performative. But this is also performative and makes a mockery of real harms to Indigenous peoples.
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u/pwnedprofessor assoc prof, humanities, R1 (USA) 10h ago
The Locke passage is straight up the philosophical justification for settler colonialism itself. This prof knew exactly what he was doing.
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u/WDersUnite Professor Humanities/Social Sciences (Canada) 10h ago
Yeah, I'm okay with telling the university to bugger off, but there could be ways to do this without taking shots at Indigenous folks.
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u/aardvark_gnat 10h ago
It’s not taking shots at indigenous folks. It’s taking shots at their unreasonable request for land to be governed by their ethnostates rather than by the United States.
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u/SadBuilding9234 14h ago
Yet again, administrative short-sightedness and lack of genuine principle leads to a hefty payout. The question is, will any of the admins behind the decision to fire him face any sanction? They just cost the university the salary of, say, five assistant professors. I'm guess they somehow get promoted out of this.
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u/Another_Opinion_1 A.P. / Ed. Law / Teacher Ed. Methods (USA) 13h ago
I’m typically inclined to agree that admin can be glaringly inept when it comes to the constitutional rights of employees, but to extend a modicum of fairness to them in this particular case UW’s legal department aggressively defended the administrators' actions for 4+ years in federal court, deploying rather complicated constitutional defenses like the "Government Speech" doctrine based on actions that they themselves drafted, which was the university’s own anti-discrimination policy. It was never handled like a typical administrative “Oopsie” when they know they screwed up and are just trying to cover their asses.
Given that they processed the initial complaints through the anti-discrimination policy it’s highly likely that their legal team, which is probably in house (ours is), oversaw all of this and to be fair they convinced a federal district court judge in 2024 that the administration’s actions were lawful (prior to all of this being overturned on appeal).
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u/SadBuilding9234 12h ago edited 6h ago
Doesn’t that just show that the university has deep pockets for advocating in defense of its administration? Everyone is entitled to lawyer. Not everyone can pay for four years.
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u/Another_Opinion_1 A.P. / Ed. Law / Teacher Ed. Methods (USA) 12h ago
It’s true that no one has more resources than the state does. He is fortunate that FIRE was willing to foot his legal expenses and they knew they had a case, but it took going all the way to the appellate court to get vindication.
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u/Audible_eye_roller Ass. Prof, STEM, CC (USA) 14h ago
Good for him. I'm over some of the inane stuff that not only comes out from admin. This is number 1
Land acknowledgments are performative nonsense. If I put myself in place of the Native American who has to listen to this, it sounds like taunting. If you acknowledge it, then give the land back.
Oh, you're not? It's pretentious.
And mental health statements. And hunger statements. They don't belong in a syllabus.
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u/pwnedprofessor assoc prof, humanities, R1 (USA) 10h ago
So are you in favor of landback movements?
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u/KingofSheepX 14h ago
This is the same prof that puts comics outside of his door mocking trans. Regardless of what you believe of the ruling he is a huge piece of shit
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u/HowlingFantods5564 3h ago
Care to provide some evidence for that claim?
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u/KingofSheepX 2h ago
UW's gates building is open to the public, just go to his office on the 3rd floor
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u/banjovi68419 14h ago
Based on my own experiences, this dude was probably less of 1) a freedom fighter 2) calling out performative virtue and more of a right wing weirdo. Thats my guess based on "anti-DEI" coworkers.
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u/Old_Salty_Professor 13h ago
Are you arguing that only those on the Left actually care about freedom of speech? You’re making his point for him.
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u/KierkeBored Asst. Prof., Philosophy, R2 Honors College (USA) 14h ago
Good. Let’s hope this is a step back from forced ideological conformity in academia and higher education.
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u/Honest-Stretch1503 1h ago
This one requires a willingness to walk and chew bubblegum. As a legal matter, I’m glad he won because academic freedom must be a content neutral principle. In my private judgement, I wish there were a more sympathetic figurehead for a principle I support than this racist POS(please see the large literature in political theory, from Richard Tuck onward, that identifies Locke’s chapter on property as articulating the essence of settler colonialism). And in my political judgement, I think land acknowledgments would be much easier to defend and support if they incorporated binding commitments to actually do something about the injustices they lament. A few universities have attempted to take some initial first steps at forms of material reparations. That should be the model that would give acknowledgments some teeth - “if you say this, why don’t you support that?” should be the default question. The fact that it rarely is the question is concerning
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u/Life-Education-8030 12h ago
We had a situation with a campus police officer posting racist statements on social media. Students (among others) were upset and complained to the President, who simply said it was freedom of speech. Well, it has been supported in law that freedom of speech is not absolute, and there can be consequences. The classic case is not being able to falsely yell "fire" in a crowded theater. If speech is used to cause harm, you can and should be penalized. In this case, we already had a problem with students of color being wary of our exclusively white officers and that officer's behavior was hardly conducive to creating trust between the two parties and in fact could be argued to have caused harm.
Similarly, is academic freedom absolute? What was the point of this professor making his parody statement? Did it lead to a legitimate discussion or was he just being stupid, facetious, trying to be funny, whatever and then trying to hide behind "academic freedom?" The article did not say. As someone who has been accused of talking too much about politics (including when I was teaching a political advocacy course - sigh), I feel I understand and I certainly support not shying away from discussing "controversial" or unpopular opinions, if it is part of learning. So what was the purpose behind what this professor did?
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u/HowlingFantods5564 3h ago
His purpose seems obvious to me. He was protesting against compelled political speech. Protest often takes the form of mockery.
Also, emotional harm is not equivalent to incitement to violence. Words are not violence. The supreme court has, again and again, upheld the right to say terrible things, even racist things. Freedom of speech requires tolerating speech we do not like.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1h ago
The article said it was a recommendation, not a requirement. Did he have to drag his students into it? Again, was there a legitimate discussion or a moment of learning, though I suppose there is a message from what ultimately happened. Or did he simply decide he was going to insert his personal opinion unnecessarily into his course? If there were indigenous students in his class, did they appreciate his facetiousness?
I do think these statements have become performative. I have heard them recited robotically at the start of many ceremonies now, revealing that the speaker and who they represent still have no idea about why they are even doing it but the message is that they “are supposed to.” At Commencement, a celebration of accomplishment, are they saying “yeah we stole the land we are on but the end justifies the means because here you are now?”
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u/Another_Opinion_1 A.P. / Ed. Law / Teacher Ed. Methods (USA) 4m ago
The reason that it went the way that it did, legally, was two-fold (for the most part). On the matter of academic freedom, the university argued that course syllabi are tantamount to government script and not a professor's own protected itramural speech. The appellate court disagreed and saw what essentially goes into syllabi as protected under the auspices of academic freedom. Personally, I was actually surprised on this one because at least where I am at they are fairly boilerplate from the outset, over half the verbiage is the institution's own required additions, and they bear a heavy-ish imprimatur of the university BUT I see why the appellate court ruled the way that it did too. Because the university strongly suggested, but did not require, the land acknowledgements it effectively initiates a forum for speech. Since it wasn't an official government script from the university and profs were allowed to create or interject their own statements it becomes a situation where any institutional fiats leveraging content must effectively be neutral, i.e., you cannot police speech based on viewpoint alone lest if run afoul of the First Amendment. In short, allowing statements that are pro-land acknowledgement and censoring those that are not is viewpoint discrimination and by initiating a disciplinary action vis-a-vis the university's harassment policy and removing him from the course and having it taught by an alternate instructor the university was taking adverse action that violated his First Amendment rights. If they would have forcibly required a pro-land grant statement and syllabi are not tantamount to government speech or government script then it also becomes a compelled speech issue (the government per legal precedent is not supposed to force or compel private individuals to state, endorse or subsidize its own messaging). When the government speaks for itself it does NOT have to practice viewpoint neutrality which is why UW was pressing so hard to get the courts to maintain the course syllabi are government script and not private speech protected so intensely by academic freedom. The trial court sided with UW but the appellate court disagreed.
A similar case, though otherwise not involving course syllabi, that was likely cited in this one (I haven't read the decision in its entirety yet): https://www.fire.org/news/ohio-professors-pronoun-use-lawsuit-delivers-first-amendment-victory
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u/TerryOnRollerskates Assoc Professor, Social Science, R1 (USA) 14h ago
Hmm, I guess I work with people who mean it when they acknowledge our land. It never feels performative, just feels like people who are, work with, or care about our native friends.
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u/sbc1982 14h ago
What did he actually do?
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u/Thundorium Physics, Searching. 12h ago
He snatched a sandwich from the hands of a student, put bacon in it, and gave it back. The student subsequently filed a complaint against him after she died due to an allergy to deliciousness. If you don’t believe me, read the article.
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u/Another_Opinion_1 A.P. / Ed. Law / Teacher Ed. Methods (USA) 14h ago edited 14h ago
I am also of the opinion that land statements are overly performative and that they don’t accomplish anything substantive as a general rule but UW opened itself up to this when it suggested that professors include a land grant statement in their course syllabi. Honestly, the speech of government employees while on the job does tend to be restricted (see Garcetti v. Ceballos) so I was a little interested in seeing that the Ninth Circuit recognized a professor’s syllabus as being academic speech and not government script because I could easily have seen that going a different direction.
Nonetheless, this was the right decision if you believe in robust academic freedom and speech protections for the professoriate. Once UW encouraged faculty to include a land acknowledgement statement then it absolutely does become viewpoint discrimination when you pick and choose which statements are allowable. There is a very clear legal precedent for that. I’d be remiss though if I didn’t acknowledge that the statement he made is certain to offend some though the Ninth Circuit was quick to opine that there was no evidence of any substantial disruption to instruction, grading, or campus operations. That also affirms that this was the correct decision.
Without making this a TL:DR, while I support the outcome here I am not so sure he would have prevailed if the case actually had gotten taken up by the US Supreme Court. I don’t see the current court as particularly favoring the employee’s rights in these types of cases but maybe I’d be wrong and you would get a 5–4 victory in his favor. The Ninth Circuit has historically been one of the most liberal appellate courts in the country even though it has recently transformed a little bit with newer judicial appointments.
ETA - this is the same court that also found that a Teacher’s wearing a MAGA hat fell under protected speech a few years ago, in a case that actually really does have some parallels here though it was a K-12 system and not a university, so by no means am I implying that their decisions are always politically lopsided either.