A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a blow to Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, ruling that the state cannot restrict what professors at public colleges and universities teach about race and gender.
In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law at Florida’s public colleges and universities, concluding that the state cannot dictate classroom viewpoints by treating professors’ speech as government speech under the First Amendment.
“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Judge Britt Grant, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote for the majority.
Grant rejected Florida’s argument that professors speak on behalf of the state simply because they are public employees.
“For its part, Florida seeks to evade any First Amendment limitations at all by rigging together several speech doctrines to create a new rule that would quietly remove all free speech protections from the classroom,” Grant wrote. “Because the government pays the professors’ salaries, Florida says, their speech is the State’s speech. Emphatically no.”
She added that the state’s legal theory amounted to stitching together incompatible constitutional doctrines, writing that Florida could not “put together half a donkey and half a camel, and then ride to victory on the synthetic hybrid,” citing a quote from law professor David Cavers.
The majority also emphasized that universities are meant to expose students to competing ideas rather than shield them from controversial viewpoints.
“The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not,” Grant wrote. “Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”
The ruling affirms a 2022 district court decision that issued a preliminary injunction on the law. In that opinion, the Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker described Florida’s restrictions as “positively dystopian,” opening with a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 and concluding the law represented “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”
Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the Individual Freedom Act, commonly known as the Stop WOKE Act, in 2022 at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) urging. The law expanded Florida’s antidiscrimination statutes by prohibiting instruction that could lead students or employees to feel “guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race, sex, color, or national origin.
Grant was joined by Judge Charles R. Wilson, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton. Judge Barbara Lagoa, another Trump appointee and former DeSantis-appointed Florida Supreme Court justice, dissented, arguing that states have broad authority to determine what is taught at public institutions.
“[The First Amendment] … does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement,” Lagoa wrote. “This panel is not free to rewrite precedent simply because we dislike where it leads.”
The challenge was brought in part by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on behalf of a University of South Florida professor, a student, and a student organization. A separate lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Defense Fund on behalf of educators and students.
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FIRE celebrated the ruling, calling it a decisive victory for academic freedom.
“Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them,” the organization wrote in a statement. “Forcing an official government line—in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ the First Amendment will not tolerate.”