University professors and students are urging a federal appeals court to uphold a decision blocking a 2022 Florida law that would restrict the way race-related concepts can be taught in classrooms — a law that Gov. Ron DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act.”
Attorneys for two sets of plaintiffs filed briefs Friday arguing that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should back a preliminary injunction that Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued in November against the law. The plaintiffs contend, in part, the law violates speech rights and academic freedom.
“Not since the anti-communist measures of the McCarthy era have a state legislature interfered so directly with the academic freedom of university instructors,” said one of the briefs, filed on behalf of six instructors at Florida A&M University, the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, the University of Central Florida and Florida State University. “It was in that period, when legislatures, like Florida’s today, sought to suppress views they disfavored, that the Supreme Court developed the First Amendment principles of academic freedom.”
But in an April brief filed at the Atlanta-based appeals court, attorneys for the state argued that Walker’s ruling should be overturned, saying it “anoints individual professors as universities unto themselves, at liberty under the First Amendment to indoctrinate college students in whatever views they please, no matter how contrary to the university’s curriculum or how noxious to the people of Florida.”
“The constitutional question in this case thus boils down to this: Who decides what is and is not, to be taught in Florida’s college classrooms — individual professors or their employer, the state, in prescribing by law the content requirements and standards that govern public universities in setting their course curricula?” the state’s lawyers wrote.
DeSantis made a priority of the law, which he called the “Stop Wrongs To Our Kids and Employees Act,” or “Stop WOKE Act.”
