LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

Good news as the academic year begins in earnest.

VICTORY! After a FIRE lawsuit, the University of Washington paid $600,000 after punishing Professor Stuart Reges for parodying a university-approved “land acknowledgment” in his syllabus. 🧵 https://t.co/unrBuf5yNU pic.twitter.com/0q63E9Nfx5

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) September 3, 2026

The best thing to do with those ridiculous land acknowledgements that do nothing to offer, oh, returning that land to the previous claimants, is to mock them, and Professor Reger got himself in some trouble with the Guardians of Correct Thought for doing so.  He took them to court, and rightly so.  His course outline was nowhere near as over the top as it could have been.  “University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them. Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”

It's not as if he noted the Tsar's claims to the Pacific Northwest, or invoked Holy Scripture.  "I wonder if any academic institutions in Bethlehem have a land acknowledgement that refers to the house and lineage of David."

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay and Milwaukee.