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A professor who refused to bow to activist progressives and parrot land acknowledgements has scored a major First Amendment legal victory — after a years-long battle.
“I’m not going to be silenced. I’m not going to let them intimidate me,” professor Stuart Reges, 67, told The Post.
In 2022, University of Washington administrators encouraged Reges to include a land acknowledgement on his computer science syllabus. Such statements supposedly honor Indigenous people who previously occupied lands and have come in vogue in recent years in progressive circles. The university provided Reges with model language, but instead he offered up a well-educated parody.
“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,” he wrote in reference to John Locke’s theory of property rights.
“I was kind of making a joke,” Reges explained. “But people were outraged. They were looking for people who were violating the orthodoxy.”
A day after he uploaded his syllabus, an administrator emailed Reges, accusing him of creating a “toxic environment” and urging him to remove the statement. He refused unless all land acknowledgements were to be removed from syllabi.
“I wanted to be treated like all the other faculty,” he explained. “They could say that nobody is allowed to have a land acknowledgement, or they’re all allowed. What they’re not allowed to say is that these progressive ones are allowed, and this conservative one is not. That’s viewpoint discrimination.”
Meanwhile, a screenshot of the syllabus went viral on Reddit, sparking dozens of complaints to the administration — though the professor says that he never received any to his face.
Administrators responded by convening a disciplinary committee and launching a months-long investigation, which carried the threat of termination for Reges. An award-winning, non-tenured professor, he has taught at the university since 2004 and co-authored the widely-used textbook “Building Java Programs.”
While the investigation concluded without formal punishment, Reges was implored not to include another parody acknowledgment on his syllabus.
“That was kind of this threat that I lived under,” he said. “But I did it anyway.” (His current syllabus still features the spoof acknowledgment.)
With representation from Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Reges decided to sue the President of the university and several other administrators, seeking compensatory damages and a declaration that the school violated his First Amendment rights.
He wanted to make a statement against what he sees as an “orthodoxy” taking over academia.
“Over the last 10 years, there’s been a change at the university, a new orthodoxy that’s being pushed by people who call it ‘diversity equity, and inclusion’ — a false name for the equity agenda that they’re pushing,” he said.
On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a lower court’s decision and sided with the computer science professor, a massive victory in a now three-year-long legal battle.
His lawyers argued that he was demonstrating the futility of the land acknowledgement routine.
“Professor Reges challenged his students and fellow faculty to think about the utility and performative nature of land acknowledgment statements,” they wrote in their complaint, filed in July 2022.
According to his lawsuit, an administrator emailed Reges’ computer science students to apologize for “offensive” behavior and to provide three ways to file complaints against the professor. The school also created a second “shadow” section of his class, where easily offended students could opt to be taught his material by someone else.
Judge Daniel A. Bress sided with the professor in his opinion, released on Friday.
“When we place limits on what professors may say or impose punishment for the views they express, we destock the marketplace of ideas and imperil future generations who must be exposed to a range of ideas and readied for the disharmony of a democratic society,” he wrote.
David Rey, a spokesperson for the University of Washington, told The Post the school is considering their “next steps.”
“We maintain that we have a responsibility to protect our students and that the UW acted appropriately,” the school said. “Professor Reges has retained his faculty position and has continued teaching throughout this process.”
The case will now return to the lower court for further proceedings. Reges says the battle has been “absolutely worth it.”
“I believe that this whole [equity] movement has mostly been the result of a small group of progressive activists. They’re not in the majority,” he said. “There are a lot of liberal faculty who never liked this stuff, and if they would just speak up and take back control, I think that that would be a great outcome.
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