A federal court on Tuesday struck down part of a law signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 that aimed to restrict colleges, schools and workplaces from promoting certain viewpoints on racism, sexism and history.
The far-reaching Stop WOKE Act would have prevented faculty from teaching about systemic racism, or saying anything that could make students feel guilty for events in the past.
“It's a huge victory for the First Amendment,” said Bobby Block, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation. The American Civil Liberties Union also celebrated Tuesday's decision.
“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.
DeSantis had touted the law as ending "indoctrination" in schools and workplaces. It would ensure students learn that “no person is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive just by virtue of his or her race or sex,” he said back when the bill was first approved by the legislature.
Tuesday’s ruling found the higher education provisions of the Stop WOKE law are unconstitutional. Courts have also intervened to prevent the workplace provisions from being enacted, but it remains in effect in Florida's K-12 public schools.
The judge who wrote the decision, Britt Cagle Grant, was appointed to the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump.
“Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth,” wrote Grant, who previously clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and worked for the George W. Bush administration.
“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” she wrote.
USF prof among plaintiffs
A group of professors in Florida sued, including Adriana Novoa, a Latin American history professor at the University of South Florida. She was born in Argentina, and is now a US citizen.
"I don't think people realize how dangerous Florida's case was," she said in an interview with WUSF.
"Florida was proposing in the courts that there is such a thing as government speech, so whoever wins an election can direct professors to puppet all the words that a governor wants, even if they are not true," she said.
"So they were claiming basically the end of education as we know it."
Novoa said she got involved with the case because her students asked her to stand up for their right to learn.
"If [DeSantis's] view prevailed, we would be living in a state of censorship, and I said many times that for all the talk about Cuba in Florida, nobody realizes that in education, Florida was adopting what is the official ideology in Cuba, meaning that the government controls what is said," she added.
"So for me, it's deeply emotional."
Florida's largest teachers union, the Florida Education Association, and United Faculty of Florida, each praised the court's decision.
“The appeals court has acknowledged that we as content experts and scholars have a right to decide the content of our lessons and the curriculum for our classes,” said Robert Cassanello, President of the United Faculty of Florida.
Clay Calvert, non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank in Washingon, D.C., described the ruling as "an important victory for academic freedom for all of the states in the 11th circuit, so we're talking about Florida, Georgia, and Alabama in particular."
Calvert noted the court opinion "rejected Florida's argument that because we're paying your salary, you have no First Amendment rights. In other words, Florida basically argued that professors are nothing more than mouthpieces."
He said the state could try to bring the case back before a larger selection of judges on the 11th Circuit, in what's called a petition for a rehearing, but such efforts rarely succeed.
"I don't believe it's going to stop Governor DeSantis, or frankly, even President Trump from attacking academia, because for them it chums the waters for MAGA constituents who perceive academia as being very liberal and very much in favor of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)," Calvert said.
The 2-1 ruling contained a long dissent from Judge Barbara Lagoa, who argued: “Our task here is not to decide what the State should do, but what it may do.”
On the social media platform X, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier praised her.
“Barbara Lagoa may be the best jurist in our country. She should be on SCOTUS,” he wrote.
