Stuart Reges, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, wrote a parody land acknowledgement on his course syllabus in January 2022. The university removed it, investigated him, and slapped him with an antiharassment complaint. Four years later, the school just cut him a check for $600,000.
That's more than most professors earn in a decade of publishing papers nobody reads.
The whole saga started in December 2021, as reported by The College Fix. The University of Washington had been encouraging faculty to include "land acknowledgement" statements on their syllabi — the now-standard ritual where institutions solemnly announce they're sitting on stolen land and then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it. Reges, who apparently has a functioning sense of humor, decided to write his own version. His parody mocked the performative nature of the exercise.
Magdalena Balazinska, the director of the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, wasn't amused. She called the parody "inappropriate, offensive" and claimed it "dehumanizes and demeans Indigenous people." The university yanked the statement from his syllabus and launched an investigation.
So a professor at a public university wrote something administrators didn't like on his own syllabus, and they punished him for it. At a school that presumably teaches courses on the First Amendment.
Reges fought back with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — FIRE — and sued. The case wound through the courts until December 2025, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that university administrators were "liable under the First Amendment for retaliation and viewpoint discrimination." The Ninth Circuit. The same court that routinely bends over backward for progressive causes looked at this case and said the university crossed the line.
The settlement, announced September 3, 2026, doesn't just include the $600,000 payout. The university also agreed it cannot take any further action against Reges and rescinded the antiharassment policy it had weaponized against him.
"UW learned the hard way: Ignoring the First Amendment can be costly," said FIRE attorney Gabe Walters.
Six hundred thousand dollars' worth of costly.
The land acknowledgement trend has swept through universities, corporations, and government agencies over the past several years. It costs nothing, changes nothing, and returns nothing to the people it claims to honor. It exists purely as a loyalty test — a way to sort the compliant from the noncompliant. Reges declined to comply, and the machine tried to grind him down.
Reges himself put it plainly: "I hope that my protest can help reverse a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia."
The university spent four years and $600,000 trying to prove that mocking a performative ritual is a punishable offense at a public institution. What they actually proved is that the ritual was always about obedience, not acknowledgement.
