University pays professor $600K after being punished for parodying land acknowledgments

The University of Washington has paid a professor $600,000 after punishing him for parodying a land acknowledgment in his syllabus. Stuart Reges, a non-tenured computer science and engineering teaching professor at the university, said in his complaint that in September 2020, university officials encouraged professors (but did not require) to include the university's land acknowledgment statement in their class syllabus. Land acknowledgments are statements commonly used by universities and publi