Here is the sentence that cost the University of Washington $600,000.
"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."
Stuart Reges, a computer science professor at UW, put that line in his syllabus as a parody of the performative land acknowledgments the university had begun requiring. The university launched a year-long investigation, withheld his merit pay increase, and created a competing section of his course. A third of his students transferred away. Four years of litigation followed.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — not exactly a bastion of right-wing jurisprudence — ruled 2-1 against the University of Washington for First Amendment retaliation and viewpoint discrimination. The settlement: $600,000, plus the permanent right to post his parody acknowledgment with no administrative interference.
In perpetuity. The university bought him a lifetime pass to do the exact thing they spent four years trying to destroy him for doing.
"I hope that my protest can help reverse a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia," Reges said.
The Reges case is one of several. At Bakersfield College in the Kern Community College District, history professor Daymon Johnson was put through a five-month investigation for the offense of criticizing DEI mandates in public. Johnson called the ideological environment what it was: "being mandated to value and promote DEI with its neo-Marxist understanding of race, grievance, identity politics, and cloaked affirmative action." His settlement: $150,000 in attorney's fees, a permanent injunction prohibiting the college from investigating or disciplining him for social or political speech, and five years of federal court oversight to ensure compliance.
Five years of a federal judge watching over a college's shoulder. That's what happens when your HR department doubles as a political commissariat.
Johnson's case should sound familiar to anyone following Kern Community College District's track record. His colleague Matthew Garrett — who founded and led the Renegade Institute for Liberty — was fired by a board vote conducted in secret. The official charge: dishonesty for disagreeing with colleagues. His settlement, two years ago: $2.4 million.
You'd think the district would have gotten the message after the first seven-figure legal bill. Apparently the ideology budget runs deeper than the legal budget.
The pattern is now documented across multiple institutions. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Institute for Free Speech, and the Independent Women's Forum have been backing these cases. The courts keep returning the same answer: compelled speech is a constitutional violation, regardless of what the faculty handbook says.
A decade of DEI enforcement infrastructure — compliance officers, reporting mechanisms, mandatory training — and the return on investment is a string of court defeats, multi-million dollar payouts, and federal orders stripping the enforcement power that took years to accumulate. The machinery was expensive to build. It's turning out to be even more expensive to operate.
Reges gets his parody and $600,000. Johnson gets a permanent injunction and $150,000. Garrett already took $2.4 million. The universities get to explain to their boards why the free speech they tried to suppress ended up costing more than the programs they were trying to protect.
