Land acknowledgments have become standard at academic and political events, including the opening of the Obama Presidential Library and a recent Michigan Democratic event. While supporters insist it merely shows respect for original inhabitants, critics argue it is the ultimate virtue signaling and is increasingly being forced on both speakers and audiences. One critic is Professor Stuart Reges, who teaches at the computer science and engineering school of the University of Washington. He has now received a settlement from the University of Washington, which spent a significant amount of time and resources in response to his mocking of the school’s land acknowledgment.
We previously discussed the case of Professor Reges, who was disciplined because he refused to post the school’s “land acknowledgment” and instead posted an alternative statement. Professor Reges sued the university and various officials in 2022. Professor Reges has declared “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court.”
The defendants included Nancy Allbritton, the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington, Magdalena Balazinska, Director of the Allen School, UW President Ana Mari Cauce, and the Allen School’s Vice Director Dan Grossman.
After the university encouraged faculty to add a prewritten “Indigenous land acknowledgment” statement to their syllabi, Reges decided to write his own statement. He has now been told that, while the university statement is optional, his statement is unacceptable because it questions the indigenous land claim of the Coast Salish people.
The school provided a recommended statement for all faculty to post and/or read to their students at the first of every course:
“The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.”
Professor Reges disagreed with that statement and expressed his doubts to the faculty while also noting that “Magda” did not want the faculty to discuss such reservations on the email system. That may refer to the Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Magdalena Balazinska.
Reges’ alternative statement read:
“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.”
The labor theory (which I teach) generally refers to John Locke’s theory. In his Second Treatise, Locke laid the foundation for property as a divine gift of God that began in the state of nature, where all was created in common by God. Reges declared that these tribes, indigenous people, “can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land and that the claim of the university land was not sufficiently used or developed to bestow a claim upon the Coast Salish people. That acknowledged group is a broad collection of different groups with ethnic or linguistic associations.”
In his lawsuit, Professor Reges says that, after he stated his own views, the university moved against him.
“On January 4, 2022, the day after Professor Reges’s Computer Science and Engineering 143 class met for the first time, Defendant [Magdalena] Balazinska, Director of the Allen School, sent Professor Reges an email ordering him to remove the statement from his syllabus because it was ‘offensive’ and created a ‘toxic environment.’”
Reges noted that the university allowed other professors “to include modified statements in their syllabi that were more consistent with the University’s recommended statement.” The operative point is that “other faculty at the Allen School continue to include land acknowledgment statements in their syllabi that differ from the University’s own statement, so long as they express a viewpoint consistent with the University’s recommended version.”
According to the complaint, Balazinska then allegedly removed his dissenting statement, and the university emailed his students to apologize for their professor’s “offensive” land acknowledgment opinion and advised them on “three ways students could file complaints against” him. The students were later allegedly told by Balazinska that, according to the complaint, “all students in Professor Reges’s Computer Science and Engineering 143 class section [can] switch into a new ‘shadow’ class section, which would meet at the same time as Professor Reges’s class section.”
Reges notes that the alternative class was a series of recorded lectures, but viewed as a reasonable alternative to being in a class with a professor with a dissenting view on land acknowledgments. Some 170 out of his 500 students took the alternative course.
I previously wrote how universities can use course assignments and other collateral means to isolate dissenting professors in an effort to get them to resign. This is especially true of tenured faculty.
I wrote that:
The Reges case could prove a major challenge to that orthodoxy. All university faculty should have condemned the university’s actions as an attack on academic freedom and freedom of speech, regardless of how they feel about land acknowledgment. The silence, however, is a reflection of how much has changed in higher education.”
It has now resulted in a $600,000 settlement after the university spent massive amounts of public money over four years to fight this lawsuit over the abusive treatment of Professor Reges.
The university settled only after the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in December that administrators were “liable under the First Amendment for retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.”
Unfortunately, there is no indication that the university officials who created this fiasco will be held accountable in any way. Millions were spent, and years of litigation were triggered by the orthodoxy of the university. However, these officials will likely be heralded by their colleagues, and nothing is likely to change in the University of Washington’s intellectual echo chamber.
However, according to FIRE, the settlement “stipulates that the university cannot take any further action against Reges.”
Congratulations to Professor Reges and FIRE for a well-fought case with potentially lasting implications in protecting free speech and academic freedom.
Talk is cheap. If they’re serious give the land back. Of course, remove the buildings and facilities constructed on it and restore it as it was 200+ years ago.
If I’d been at the UW and seen Prof. Reges’ land acknowledgment I’d have signed up for his course even if it wasn’t my major interest. 😃
I wince every day listening to Trump. But that was really the only choice in 2024. These Jacobins are truly crazy and dangerous.
@Anonymous
I would imagine you wince everyday simply because you woke up to another morning and you have no acuity to handle that just waking up to a new day where you may have to do things. That isn’t even depression in the classical sense; just laziness and taught helplessness.
It is not Trump’s (whatever one may think of him) influence, just your own stupid thinking, and your inability to think better and hence do better. Your parents are likely partly the culprits for not teaching you such fundamental skills, not Trump, not Congress, not the electoral College, not the Constitution, not capitalism or having more or less melanin.
And things are so insane at this point, no, that does not mean you should murder your parents. Find your balls and spine, and kindness in conjunction, instead. If you don’t know what that means, seek help.
This is me. Typo somewhere in hasty posting. I actually work.
Professor Reges and FIRE are the new warriors in the battle against — let us call it by its true name — “academic tyranny” now infecting many if not most of the nation’s institutions of higher learning. Congratulations to both and more power to them. The Republic needs more victories such as the one addressed by Professor Turley if it is to survive the fate warned about by Ben Franklin.
My wife (a former lawyer) actually shared this with me earlier independently of the column. I don’t always agree with FIRE’s logic, but this is how we do it: small precedent after small precedent until the precedent is huge. It’ll take more than two years. Vote wisely in November, everything really and truly depends on it. The dems are in an absolute panic, and the time to continue to restore sanity and law is now.
Petty grievances and sitting out elections over them – those days are gone. We can have freedom, or we can have Virginia, where mothers get arrested for letting their kid walk alone half a mile to the park in a closed community.
People in traditionally red or purple states that think they will magically skate by need to shake themselves from their naivete. That sort of thing and so much more will absolutely be federalized under a dem majority, it won’t matter anymore how red or purple a state is when it is the law of the consolidated land (that is what they want, and they want it to be global); they intend for it to be permanent, and will change our laws to make it so in no time flat. In that event, there would be literally no recourse anymore, and that is where we are at.
There is always recourse, not the best option, but recourse nevertheless, guaranteed by the 2nd amendment.
@Anonymous
You just don’t seem to get it; if ever in power again they will change those fundamental rules that you rely on to self-correct, and that option is simply gone. You perfectly elucidate what I posted in terms of a sleepy mentality. There is no magical guarantee, and woe unto us that do not see it, 2020 should have settled that for good. The modern left will trash the Constitution and its subsequent law without a thought. they will not care if you disagree or argue. We are dealing with a regime. Wake up. Snap out of it. this is not the 90s, or the 60s, or even the century prior.
Absolute panic is trying to rename a lake whose name predates the founding of America to distract from a doubling of gasoline prices, stalled real wages for the majority of Americans, a war in Iran that he no longer calls a war so as to not be on the hook for combat pay, exhausting the majority of close defense missile systems, and so on.
Panic is hiding Moscow Mitch McConnell like “A Weekend at Bernies” rather than admit that he can no longer vote in the Senate.
Panic is building a smokescreen of distractions, from promising to demolish the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the endless failure to complete a water project in his own back yard.
The U.S. Constitution acknowledges the conservative and traditional peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared oceans of the American people. Communists didn’t build that, but they’re definitely trying to hijack it.
“The defendants included Nancy Allbritton, the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington, Magdalena Balazinska, Director of the Allen School, UW President Ana Mari Cauce,”
Well, here might be our first use of the Lindsey Clancy defense should that raging nutjob win her case.
The defendents could now claim that any untoward action by any/or all of the females listed above as defendants were the result of hormonal imbalance and that these 3, plus their cowered Beta male Grossman, made these actions against the professor because it was “that time of the month” for all 4 of them.
Today, parody. Tomorrow, reality.
Priceless!
-g
How did the “higher” education of our children become the domain of the opponents of education?
Stephen, proponents of education went silent. Every professor should have condemned what the university did to a colleague over a syllabus line.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. John Stuart Mill
People may understand that education is a formative environment. But I doubt they realize the absence of education is also a formative environment. That space doesn’t remain empty.
The population of the right of the nation just stopped paying attention and thought everything was still like it was when we went to school. This is on our shoulders for not paying attention.
How I fought ‘land acknowledgements’ on campus — and won
https://nypost.com/2026/09/03/opinion/how-i-fought-land-acknowledgements-on-campus-and-won/
In his own words.
He lost at district level but won on appeal. We have a huge problem with our district judges.
Again, we weren’t paying attention and kept thinking that all judges were impartial rather than looking at their background and education. This is, again, on us.
He won 2-1 on appeal. Overall, judges split 2-2. How resounding.
IKR
For someone with no high school education, you sure do come across as really really stoopid.
Meta- Facebook just settled a suit for 17.1 billion dollars over 10 years brought by 47 states, District of Columbia and US territories. For practices harmful to children, including mental harm. That’s a much larger scale and countervailing power than the Professor’s suit here. But they share the same space on what goes into deciding when to settle and for how much. Things like the cost of the litigation budget and amount of exposure to liability. Meta had to be concerned about shareholders as a constituency, and reputational impact on advertising revenue. In the Professor’s case we don’t have a metric for taxpayer protection concern against Washington University’s total outlay to get to settlement. I’m not optimistic that the liberal government in Olympia will have its nose out of joint for the taxpayer hit from the settlement. What I can see is that this settlement was about the stench of compelled speech about land acknowledgment girded with fuzzy edges as camouflage. My takeaway is that the resolution of this dispute advanced the cause of speech and academic freedom toward a very desirable end. A balanced university in search for the truth. And equally, students graduating with critical thinking knowhow to likewise discern truth.
I am finishing my second week of college today.
All the classes syllabus have really generic, legal like statements to inclusion, title IX, and sustainability. Every professor just noted them and did not bother to read them. One professor even commented on how she “had” to have a syllabus with an eye roll.
Good on these professor’s winning against wokeism.
You in college? More like 8th grade. You didn’t even make it out of high school. Can’t even write a intelligible comment.
He cannot even master the correct use of an apostrophe, or rather, in this case, not using one. Hopefully an F on his first essay.
Sounds more like your professors genuflected to your local Magda and students said nothing. What a bunch of syllabubus. Only Charlie Sheen would call that Winning!(tm)
The good part is that these vacuous performative acts of conformity will be a distant memory by your 10th or 15th week.
Good luck with your efforts, Upstate. Glad some professors see through the idiocracy.
The syllabus is for students to read. Expecting a professor to read the syllabus to you is just weird.
Have you heard the one about three Woke feminists and a sympathizer Jew?
Why is it always the same story about this crazy?
FIRE brought this case for Reges. Here is their statement on its outcome:
https://www.fire.org/news/washington-professor-who-parodied-university-land-acknowledgment-wins-600k-settlement
FIRE seems OK
“In June 2025, FIRE filed a brief in support of Harvard University’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s cuts in research funding, despite the group’s past criticism of Harvard’s free speech policies.”
Nicely done
Kudos to Professor Reges (and his attorneys) for winning the case and getting a good monetary return. I also am happy the 9th Circuit backed him up and also forestalled further legal harassment. We need a groundswell of further cases like this so that this virtue signalling becomes extinct .
Prof. Reges and his attorneys won the case and got a good monetary return, respectively. He took nothing for the abuse and tribulation.
The left-wing imagination imposes a model of oppression and victimhood on history. Yet the movement of peoples, before the establishment of States, was the historical norm. The anglo-saxons moved into England, the Romans earlier moved into Italy, and the Greeks into Greece. Only borders stopped this movement. Oddly, Americans leftists want to eliminate our Southern border.
The Romans did not move into Italy; they were already there. The Greeks may, or may not, have moved into Greece although the old received wisdom about the Dorian invasions are getting shakier. So that leaves the Anglo-Saxons – note capitalisation. Except they were of course not Anglo-Saxons, as that name only came a few centuries later, and were Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Franks. Even then, it is not clear how much ethnic cleansing actually went on, as opposed to the imposition of a Germanic culture on a majority Romano-British peasantry.
Otherwise, the old theories of European mass migration are very much dying in favour of more complex and nuanced theories of ethnogenesis. That, however, would probably just confuse you.
What sources are you using?
A multitude of works by very learned historians. If you want to educate yourself, rather than rely on Wiki, try any works by Kulikowski, Heather, Halsall, Marc Morris, Cornell, Lomas. They are just some of the most modern and accessible. 🙂
Reply to Anonymous at 11:20 am:
“An analysis of some of the earliest samples more or less comports with what has been found around Europe – they represent an influx of farmers primarily descended from early agriculturalists from Turkey and Iran around 8,000 years ago, followed by a shift toward ancestry from the Ukrainian steppe somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago. By the founding of Rome, traditionally dated to 753 BCE, the city’s population had grown in diversity and resembled modern European and Mediterranean peoples.”
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/11/genetic-history-rome
Funny how the loudest voices screaming about “stolen land” and making land acknowledgments refuse to leave. They build schools on stolen land yet refuse to open the doors and dorms to “native” peoples. They live in houses on stolen land yet refuse to share them with “native” families who are often living in abject poverty. In this regard, they are very much like those leftists screaming “no one is illegal on stolen land” who refuse, when given the chance, to house even a single illegal alien in their own homes.
I thought the article is about free speech, not stolen land.
Read it more carefully
The first step to repairing an injustice is acknowledging an injustice. That’s the step you don’t want to take.
“It has now resulted in a $600,000 settlement after the university spent massive amounts of public money . . .” (JT)
There needs to be a new law:
Any public university employee who loses such a suit is *personally* responsible for 25% of the judgment.
Perhaps then the struggle-session fascists will think twice before usurping the civil rights of dissenters.
A law that targets a group isn’t a law its a stupid conservative’s delusional mindset.
Huh?
Wha’choo tawkin’ ’bout, Willia?
“There needs to be a new law…”
Unfortunately, that would lead to desirable outcomes only to the extent that courts can be trusted to render reasonable judgments, a premise that appears to be increasingly questionable on a daily basis.
“Massive” isn’t a dollar amount. Money has no mass at all. Nor is it clear that any money was spent that would not have been spent keeping a legal team employed for doing work of this or other kinds. When a pipe breaks no one would talk about the massive labor cost for the on-site repair staff who are paid the same whether they are repairing a pipe or awaiting the call.
To me, this is a matter of enforcing total conformity to institutional demands, regardless of whether they have any relevance to actual operations. The university offered only minimal reparations to these tribes, refusing to grant them land to address past transgressions, and instead merely required faculty to recite meaningless land acknowledgments. Even liberal faculty should have been outraged by this superficiality, yet they said nothing. It is as if someone stole your bottle of wine and toasted your ownership while drinking it down.
Conformity? It the same in the so called corporate world. Reparations aka damages, again just like in the corporate world. So what then makes academics more evil than CEOs? Everybody is trying to keep their jobs so they tow the line. So what is the problem then?
You seem to confuse a public institution (funded to provide a service) and a private corporation (self-funded, to provide a profit). Reges was hired to provide a teaching service. With that come all the benefits of the constitution. Private corporations hire employees to help provide profit, and agree to requirements when they accept their possession.
“Position” and not “Possession.”
Good
Sadly just like Gibson’s Bakery vs Oberlin College it isn’t the culprits that have to pay up. These little fascist academic tyrants skate away to their next sinecure and they continue being bow tied weaklings trying to be leaders.
WTF? Translate that please.
Well Aristotle, it means the little girl tyrants don’t have to pay so this isn’t going to end.
You can read, barely, but you can’t comprehend.
No Holiday Inn Express for you apparently. Amiright?
As soon as the people who insist on saying that they are occupying stolen land start offering to give it back to whoever they think it was stolen from, I will respect them. Until then, it’s a stupid virtue signal.
Well done Professor. If those who do these “land acknowledgements” actually cared they would give the land back to the people whom they say it was stolen from. They don’t. They won’t. Because it’s all far left, whiny, pandering, virtue signaling.🎯