The University of Washington’s First Amendment case against professor Stuart Reges has ended in a $600,000 settlement, paid to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to cover damages, legal fees, and costs, after a federal appeals court found that university administrators had violated the computer science professor’s constitutional rights.
The settlement agreement was signed on 18 August and publicly released on 3 September 2026, according to The Daily, the University of Washington’s student newspaper. The funds will come from UW’s self-insurance programme. The university has not disclosed a separate figure for the legal costs it incurred defending the litigation.
University of Washington First Amendment Ruling: What the Court Found
The case arose in 2022, when Reges included a parody of a university-recommended land acknowledgment in the syllabus for an introductory computer science course he has taught for more than two decades. Where the university suggested faculty acknowledge the Coast Salish peoples, Reges substituted a statement invoking Lockean property theory to question the factual and moral premises of such acknowledgments.
UW administrators investigated him for nearly a year, citing its antiharassment policy, and denied him a merit pay increase during the process. In December 2025, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the university in Reges v. Cauce.
The Ninth Circuit majority wrote that Reges had ‘experienced adverse employment actions, including a lengthy disciplinary investigation and reprimand, because of his protected speech,’ and that ‘the speech was protected speech, not government speech, because Reges spoke in his own capacity as a professor, and not on behalf of his employer,’ according to Inside Higher Ed. The court held that the university had engaged in both unlawful retaliation and viewpoint discrimination, which is presumptively unconstitutional. The panel also reversed the lower court’s dismissal of Reges’ claims that UW’s anti-discrimination policy was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.
Writing for the majority, Judge Daniel A. Bress stated: ‘Student discomfort with a professor’s views can prompt discussion and disapproval. But this discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating against the professor. We hold that the university’s actions toward the professor violated his First Amendment rights.’
UW spokesperson Victor Balta told Inside Higher Ed that the university chose to settle in order to avoid further legal costs, while maintaining publicly that ‘we acted appropriately.’ Reges, writing in the New York Post after the settlement was announced, rejected that characterisation: ‘They broke the law, but refuse to admit it.’
What the Settlement Requires
The terms of the agreement go well beyond a financial payment. UW has agreed not to remove Reges’ parody statement from any current or future syllabus ‘in perpetuity,’ per FIRE’s official press release dated 3 September 2026. The university also commits to refrain from offering ‘competing or shadow sections’ of his courses for students who object to his views, and forswears further adverse employment action, including any new investigation or the withholding of future salary increases.
The university’s own conduct during the litigation further undermines its insistence that it behaved properly. On 23 July 2025, UW rescinded Executive Order 31 (EO-31), the policy administrators had cited as the primary justification for investigating Reges, and replaced it with Executive Order 81 (EO-81). The old policy authorised discipline for ‘any conduct that is deemed unacceptable or inappropriate, regardless of whether the conduct rises to the level of unlawful discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.’ The new standard requires that conduct have ‘the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance’ or be ‘sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive’ to create a hostile environment.
That is a materially narrower threshold than the one used to investigate Reges. The University of Washington’s policy directory confirms EO-81 took effect on 23 July 2025, with the previous policy continuing to govern conduct predating that change.
FIRE attorney Gabe Walters framed the outcome as a matter of principle, not ideology. ‘Reasonable people can disagree about the value of land acknowledgments,’ he said. ‘What’s not up for debate is academic freedom. Today’s settlement vindicates Reges’s right to express his own opinion rather than toeing the university’s line. UW learned the hard way: Ignoring the First Amendment can be costly.’
Reges himself described the settlement as a broader warning to higher education institutions. ‘The settlement will remind public universities that they are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of their students, faculty, and staff,’ he said. The Manhattan Institute filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit supporting Reges’s position.
Subject to any further policy challenge, UW now faces the practical consequence of its revised disciplinary framework: the conduct that once prompted a year-long investigation and a merit-pay denial is now expressly protected by the very settlement its administrators still refuse to call a mistake.
