Appeals court backs professor who mocked UW's 'land acknowledgement'
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the University of Washington violated a professor’s free speech rights by investigating and retaliating against him after he mocked the school’s land acknowledgment.
Stuart Reges, a non-tenured computer science and engineering teaching professor at the University of Washington, says in his complaint against the university that, in September 2020, university officials encouraged professors to include the university’s land acknowledgment statement on their class syllabus. Land acknowledgments are statements commonly used by universities and public institutions to recognize Native American tribes as the original inhabitants of the land on which campuses now sit.
Reges parodied the university’s land acknowledgment in his Computer Programming II class syllabus in January 2022. Instead of using the university’s land acknowledgment, he wrote, “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.”
His comment was a reference to philosopher John Locke’s labor theory of property, under which ownership derives from improving the land.
Tagged: Education BACK TO HOMEPAGE