They broke the law, but refuse to admit it. My four-year battle with the University of Washington (UW) ended when it agreed to pay $600,000 for violating my First Amendment rights.

And yet, UW still says: “We acted appropriately, and this settlement is in no way an admission of any wrongdoing.”

In the last 10 years, I have grown increasingly concerned about a new orthodoxy being imposed on campus, particularly at our most prestigious institutions — in Washington, California and elsewhere.

It has often gone under the misleading title of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Inclusion, for example, involves excluding ideas that were deemed inappropriate. Anyone who disagreed was sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist and just downright immoral.

At UW we were encouraged to include an indigenous land acknowledgement on our course syllabus. These are sombre declarations intended to imply that land was stolen from local tribes.

For example, the version used at UC Berkeley’s health services division says, in part:

“By offering this Land Acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.

“We also affirm that this acknowledgment is insufficient. It does not undo the harm that has been done and continues to be perpetrated now against indigenous people, their land, and water.“

I consider such statements to be performative acts of conformity, and I initially ignored UW’s advice. But I realized I could express my disagreement by including a parody version.

The university was not amused, and it retaliated by censoring my syllabus, apologizing to my students for my statements, creating a second section of my course to allow students to avoid having me as their instructor and spending over a year investigating whether I should be punished.

With the assistance of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), I was able to sue the university. We lost at the district level, but won on appeal. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled: “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.”

I’ve seen this play before, in the early 1990s, when a number of universities adopted “hate speech” policies. That first wave of political correctness was reversed when universities ended up in court and lost case after case. So I knew that pursuing my case would be helpful, even though it took over four years to work its way through the system.

I am astonished that the university still insists that it behaved appropriately. I was hoping that behind closed doors the administrators might admit that they made a mistake.

And it’s not just UW. Washington State filed an amicus brief in support of UW in which it said, “Now is not the time to make it harder for the circuit’s public colleges and universities to ensure safe learning environments.” They were joined by the three other major public universities in Washington (Western Washington, Eastern Washington and Central Washington).

So in the name of student safety, all of our major public universities in Washington state want to protect students from hearing ideas that might upset them. They don’t realize that they are doing these students a great disservice. Especially in modern times, when we have such bitter arguments over public policy, our students need to learn how to cope with disagreement and how to have open, honest and productive debate. Otherwise we have no hope of solving the critical problems we face.

So how do I feel about this? Grateful, but also somewhat numb, almost like I was reading about something that happened to someone else.

They don’t warn you about the waiting. The loneliness of waiting for something to happen day after day. The distance you feel from events that happened years ago. The rotation of lawyers on both sides reminding you that life goes on even if you feel stuck in time waiting for a resolution.

I also recognize how lucky I was to have such unwavering support from those at FIRE. They are often unfairly labeled as “right wing” even as they fight the Trump administration when its policies threaten free and open debate on campus. They are truly the free speech warriors of our day.

Stuart Reges is a teaching professor at the University of Washington’s (UW) Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

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