The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit blocked the higher education portion of Florida’s 2022 Individual Freedom Act, widely known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” ruling in a 2-1 decision that the law violates the First Amendment.
The decision affirms a lower court’s preliminary injunction against the law, which barred public college and university professors from promoting or endorsing eight specific concepts relating to race, color, sex, or national origin during instruction.
Under the 2022 law, public university instructors were prohibited from teaching subjects like critical race theory or gender ideology in a way that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students to believe them.
The statute permitted neutral discussion of the concepts as part of a larger course but banned any endorsement under threat of severe penalties, including the withholding of university performance funding and the potential termination of instructors.
The state of Florida defended the restrictions by arguing that because the government funds public universities and pays the professors’ salaries, the instructors’ classroom speech constitutes government speech, giving the state complete control over the message.
Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Britt Grant rejected the state’s position, calling the “salary-for-speech” rule 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.”
The majority opinion stated that the First Amendment does not allow the government to mandate a single political viewpoint in a university setting. “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,” Grant wrote. “Forcing an official government line—in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ that the First Amendment will not tolerate.”
The court clarified that while public universities and state governments retain the authority to manage workplaces, determine curricula, and ensure professional competence, they cannot implement blanket legislative bans on disfavored political viewpoints. The majority also noted that the law’s lack of clear definitions left professors guessing as to what classroom statements or teaching methods might trigger penalties.
In her dissenting opinion, Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa argued that the state’s authority is at its highest within public classrooms and that previous precedents allow public employers to control instructional content.
“The professor-plaintiffs are state employees, and the speech at issue here occurs during their state-sponsored instruction in a course taken for credit by students enrolled in the State’s public universities,” Lagoa wrote in her dissent. “Our precedent is clear that states retain authority to restrict a professor’s ‘viewpoint’ in a public classroom, even if the professor’s viewpoint ‘represents his professional opinion.'”
Lagoa maintained that Florida acted within its authority to curb specific ideological endorsements to prevent what the state deems to be discrimination and coercion in an environment where professors hold grading power over students. She stated that the majority’s ruling improperly shifts the authority to set educational limits from elected state representatives to the federal judiciary.
The ruling leaves the preliminary injunction in place, preventing the Florida Board of Governors of the State University System and university trustees from enforcing the challenged higher education restrictions while the underlying litigation continues.
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