Four years after the University of Washington began investigating Stuart Reges for authoring a satirical ‘land acknowledgement,’ his First Amendment rights have been upheld by the Ninth Circuit.
Like others, I decided to strike a blow against such policies through satire—specifically, by including a parody version of a land acknowledgement on my course syllabus in January 2022. Instead of using the university’s version, I 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.
The “labor theory of property” originates with seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. In Two Treatises of Government, he argues that when one’s labour is mixed with shared land, the land loses its public character, because people own the products of their work. Or as Locke originally put it: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
For example, the land on which downtown Seattle sits was once an Indigenous village—which gives the tribes in question a claim of ownership according to this theory. But UW’s main campus was carved out of dense forest, and therefore would not qualify.
My land acknowledgement quickly became a hot topic within UW’s reddit community, with many social-justice-minded students expressing outrage. UW officials pronounced themselves “horrified,” censored my syllabus, and offered my students an alternate course section if they wanted a different instructor. The university then began an investigation, which could have led to the termination of my employment.