Professor Sues University after Being Penalized for Refusing to Include ‘Land Acknowledgment’ on Syllabus

A University of Washington professor is suing his workplace, claiming that it infringed upon his free-speech rights by penalizing him for refusing to include a specific social justice-oriented statement on his class syllabus acknowledging that the school stole the land it occupies from Native Americans.

Stuart Reges, a computer science and engineering teaching professor, said the college put up hurdles to make it difficult to teach after he added to his syllabus a different version of the “University’s ‘Indigenous Land Acknowledgment Statement” that didn’t politicize the country’s territorial acquisitions. The university began the “land acknowledgment” initiative in September 2020.

Reges’ version “challenged his students and fellow faculty to think about the utility and performative nature of land acknowledgment statements,” according to the legal filing.

“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,” Reges wrote in his syllabus.

The school argued that the statement caused “disruption to instruction,” likely because students complained to the administration. However, Reges said he discussed the syllabus in class on his first day “without incident.”

The university then took a series of hostile steps against Reges, launching an investigation and forming a committee “to consider whether to further punish or even terminate Professor Reges because of the views he expressed in his dissenting statement,” the court documents show. Students were also “invited” to ditch Reges’ class for a “shadow” class section taught by another professor on tape, according to the filing.

Reges claims that the antagonism and attempted cancellation he’s faced for exercising his judgement as a professor has “chilled” his speech.

“It’s a very simple First Amendment case where the university encouraged professors to include land acknowledgments on our syllabus, and they suggested a progressive version of it. I included a more conservative version of it, and they freaked out,” Reges told Fox News Digital.

He suggested that the school’s request for a statement presumed that faculty would admit that America, and the University of Washington, should have enduring guilt for expanding into regions of the country once inhabited by Native Americans.

“It was clear that they wanted a particular kind of land acknowledgment. There was a particular view of American history that they wanted you to affirm, you know, that the United States is evil and that we stole land from native tribes and so forth,” Reges told Fox News Digital. “So I took them up on the suggestion to include one, and I included one that I knew they wouldn’t like because it didn’t match that view of history. And they really went crazy.”

Reges violated university policies by not adhering to the expectations for the syllabus statement, the school has claimed. The university also denies that it harmed Reges’ First Amendment liberties.

“The University of Washington is reviewing the complaint,” University Spokesperson Michelle Ma said of Reges’ legal filing in a statement to Fox News. “The university continues to assert that it hasn’t violated Stuart Reges’ First Amendment rights and we look forward to making that case in court.”