Appeals Court Blocks Portion of Florida ‘Stop Woke Act’ Restricting Professors’ Speech on Race, Gender

’A federal appeals court says Florida cannot restrict how professors at public colleges and universities talk about race and gender. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit voted two to one to block the Sunshine State from enforcing a provision of the Stop WOKE Act.The law sought to prevent institutions from pushing “woke ideology” about race and gender. It prevented instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students to believe certain ideas about race, sex, national origin, and privilege. It prohibited instructors from making students or workers feel “anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race, sex, or national origin.A Trump appointee, Judge Britt C. Grant, wrote, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”“Because the government pays the professors’ salaries, Florida says, their speech is the state’s speech,” Judge Grant said. “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.”The jurist added, “The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not. Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”The judge who dissented, Barbara Lagoa, said that the First Amendment “does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”“This panel is not free to rewrite precedent simply because we dislike where it leads,” Judge Lagoa said. Governor Ron DeSantis touted the law in 2022, saying Florida “will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces.”“There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said.Free speech advocates celebrated the decision to block the higher education portion of the Stop WOKE Act. A senior attorney at FIRE, Greg Greubel, said in a statement, “Today’s important decision means that college remains a place where professors and students are allowed to debate controversial topics — even if politicians disagree with them.”“Today’s ruling makes clear something we’ve known for a long time: Governments cannot censor their way to freedom,” Mr. Greubel said. Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, criticized the decision to block the law, writing on X, “According to the [Eleventh Circuit] panel majority, public university professors have a First Amendment right to teach white supremacy and critical race theory, and the legislature cannot pass laws that say otherwise.”Mr. Uthmeier called the opinion “totally incoherent and inconsistent” with the First Amendment.

Appeals Court Blocks Portion of Florida ‘Stop Woke Act’ Restricting Professors’ Speech on Race, Gender

Appeals Court Blocks Portion of Florida ‘Stop Woke Act’ Restricting Professors’ Speech on Race, Gender

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