Court Sides With Washington Prof Punished for Mocking University Land Acknowledgment
“violated a professor’s free speech rights by investigating and retaliating against him”
The court was right to side with this professor. Land acknowledgements deserve to be mocked.
FOX News reports:
Federal appeals court sides with Washington professor punished for mocking university land acknowledgment
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.
Reges sued the university in July 2022, alleging that UW officials ordered him to remove the statement, condemned it as offensive and encouraged students to file complaints. Administrators also created a competing “shadow” course section so students could avoid his class and launched a disciplinary investigation that raised the possibility of further discipline or termination.
In a ruling Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling and sent the case back to determine appropriate relief.
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Comments
The Land Acknowledgement lawn signs are in the same class as the Hate Has No Home Here signs: sanctimonious rot deserving of mockery.
Good news that the professor got the backing of the federal court in his case.
Respectfully, that’s neither the legal issue nor what the court did.
UW is a public university, everything it does is state action, and the First Amendment applies. The state can only restrict speech in terms of time, place, or manner — and then only in a content neutral manner. There is a concept of a “public forum” and “limited public forums” which I am skipping over here to stay out of the weeds.
What the court said here, sorta, was that if UW is going to tell professors to put a land acknowledgement statement on their syllabi, professors have the academic freedom right to state one which they believe to be true. Sort of.
(Don’t get me going about the asinine dissent…)
It’s more than just mocking — the Labor Theory of Value is a Marxist economic theory that the value of something should be determined by the amount of labor needed to produce it.
As the Indians had done nothing to improve the land that UW was built on, as they had not put any labor into it, they had nothing of value to be stolen from them.
The two nice things about this are (a) it reflects more on the Indian than European concept of property and (b) it reflects the Marxist theories that underlie all of this land acknowledgment garbage.
Woops. Don’t confuse the labor theory of value with the labor theory of property.
The labor theory of value says that a hammer handle made of balsa wood has equal value as one made of oak, because they took the same time to grow and the same labor to shape and fit. It also says that a barn built by an Amish farmer is less valuable than a barn built by the Three Stooges because there were three of them and it took them twice as long to make one that didn’t fall over. As you say, it’s hogwash.
The labor theory of property is somewhat different. It attempts to address the problem of land ownership. It states that improved property has a greater demonstrable value to all than property left fallow, and the owner gains a stronger title to the property by working it than someone who does not. It figures into laws such as adverse possession that are still in force today. It was an attempt to handle the issue of elite landlords with large tracts of land that peasants could otherwise have worked to the benefit of all, but were prohibited. I’m not a huge fan of it, but compared to the other, at least it started with a rational basis.
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