The University of Washington (UW) has agreed to pay $600,000 as a settlement in the lawsuit initiated by Professor Stuart Reges following a decision that found the UW administrators had breached his First Amendment rights by engaging in retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.
The settlement, which was announced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), stops the university from taking any further action against Reges or deleting the parody statement from his syllabi.
The controversy started in 2022 when the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering urged its professors to put a land acknowledgment on their syllabi. However, Reges stated that, according to the labor theory of property, the tribes had ‘almost no historical claim to the land which is now occupied by the University of Washington’. The university censored his syllabus, set up an alternative version of his course, and launched an inquiry that lasted for nearly a year…