University of Maryland department forces professors to acknowledge they’re on ‘stolen land’

So-called land acknowledgments are a popular form of virtue signaling for woke students and faculty.

Right in time for Thanksgiving, the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy has decreed that faculty must participate in corporate confessions of sin to the previous inhabitants of the taxpayer-funded institution’s geography. UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment expert, shared an email he was forwarded from the department on its newly approved “syllabus statement” on “Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging.”

It’s mandatory for all syllabi starting this spring, raising the same question at issue in an Ohio professor’s lawsuit against his public university: Can the institution compel speech from faculty on their own syllabus?

Volokh notes the apparent final draft of the required materials is written “in the professor’s voice,” using “my” and “we” language instead of simply reiterating school policy.

Here’s the land acknowledgment:

We acknowledge that we are gathered on the stolen land of the Piscataway Conoy people and were founded upon the erasures and exploitation of many non-European peoples. You can find more information about the Piscataway Conoy Tribe at http://www.piscatawayconoytribe.com. For more information about the University of Maryland’s project for a richer understanding of generations of racialized trauma rooted in the institution visit https://go.umd.edu/SNW.

Faculty are not only told where to place the statement, but instructed to “vocally review” it with their students.