Reges v. Cauce: University of Washington: Professor Punished for Expressing Dissenting Opinion

Reges v. University of Washington - Complaint

Stuart Reges is an award-winning professor at the University of Washington in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Administrators punished Professor Reges after he challenged the University’s position on Native American land ownership. The Allen School encourages professors to include on their syllabi a statement recognizing that the land on which the university sits was once owned by indigenous tribes. Professor Reges parodied the University’s “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement Statement” — “I acknowledge,” he wrote on his syllabus, “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 thus challenged his students and fellow faculty to consider the utility and, in his view, performative nature of land acknowledgments.

Claiming his viewpoint was “offensive” and “inappropriate,” administrators punished Professor Reges by creating a “shadow” section of his class and launching an investigation into him under a broad, vague policy prohibiting “unacceptable” and “inappropriate” speech. That investigation, including the threat of termination, hung over Professor Reges’s head for nearly a year.

Public university faculty are free to speak on public issues in their teaching and research because academic freedom is a special concern of the First Amendment. The University invited Professor Reges to wade into a public controversy by including a land acknowledgment on his syllabus, then punished him for swimming against the university’s preferred viewpoint. The First Amendment prohibits public universities from engaging in this kind of viewpoint discrimination . Under the law, professors are free to construct their classes and syllabi as they see fit as a matter of academic freedom.

On July 13, 2022, Reges — represented by FIRE — sued University of Washington officials to challenge the investigation and punishment as viewpoint discriminatory, and the policy that forbade “unacceptable” or “inappropriate” speech as unconstitutionally overbroad and vague. This policy unconstitutionally restricted the speech of all members of the University community. With this lawsuit, Professor Reges stood up for faculty rights to express dissenting opinions on controversial topics and to manage the contents of their syllabi without retaliation.

On May 3, 2024, the district court ruled in favor of the university on all of Reges’s claims. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's decision, finding that university officials violated Reges’s First Amendment rights by retaliating against him and discriminating against his viewpoint, and it reinstated his overbreadth and vagueness claims against the policy. The Ninth Circuit remanded the case to the district court for a determination of Reges’s remedies, including money damages. While Reges’s appeal was pending, the university rescinded and replaced the “unacceptable” or “inappropriate” speech policy.

After Reges’s victory in the Ninth Circuit, the University of Washington agreed to settle the case rather than face a trial. In exchange for dismissing the lawsuit, the University paid $600,000 in Reges’s damages and attorney’s fees and agreed to take no further action against him over his parody land acknowledgment statement.