A left-wing Florida judge tried as hard as he could to overturn the state’s “intellectual freedom” survey for college students put in place by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
But, ultimately, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, a Barack Obama appointee, conceded that critics of the law creating the survey, including unionized professors, had no grounds to demand its overturning.
According to the News Service of Florida, the decision issued on Monday by Walker, a Tallahassee judge who routinely rules against DeSantis and Republicans generally, followed a trial he conducted in January.
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He determined that the plaintiffs, who included the United Faculty of Florida, a union of college professors, and individual professors, failed to establish legal standing to challenge the law, the News Service noted.
That meant they professors could not show they were harmed by the law, which they claimed violated the First Amendment and their free speech rights.
“In his decision, Walker expressed sympathy for some of the plaintiffs’ arguments but said they did not meet legal tests to show standing,” the News Service reported.
That was putting it mildly.
In his ruling, Walker declared, “Political entities have expressed clear animosity to the views plaintiffs seek to express, and the evidence presented at trial demonstrated that the surveys’ design is seriously flawed, calling into question the statistical value of their results.”
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That referred to GOP lawmakers and DeSantis who in 2022 worked to enact the bill creating the Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity.
The survey is open to all students and is both anonymous and voluntary.
And if anything, it revealed that conservative students are the ones who have self-censored in the face of wokeism on campus.
As The Free Press reported last September, when the initial results came in, roughly 18,000 students and faculty members responded from across the 12-member State University System.
The University of Florida emerged as the most ideologically intolerant of the group, as 41% of students and faculty claimed to be too intimidated to share their personal political views. UF was followed closely by Florida Gulf Coast University (39%), Florida State (37%), and the University of North Florida (also 37%).
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Continuing his left-leaning view, the judge noted in his ruling that state officials, including DeSantis, GOP lawmakers and the State Board of Education and the Board of Governors, who were named in the lawsuit, appear “to have decided that it is good policy to deputize students and faculty to monitor their peers and inform the government of the speech and perceived political leanings of their classmates and colleagues.”
Apparently Walker missed when leftists at UF impeached the president of Student Government Association because he invited Don Trump Jr. to speak on campus.
By the way, those “political leanings” are fairly well known, as was revealed in October 2020 by The College Fix, which reported that 89% of political donations by faculty members at Florida colleges went to Democrats.
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Walker added, “This court is sympathetic to the argument that laws like these — which were apparently designed to chill speech and, though left intentionally toothless for enforcement purposes, remain hanging over students’ and professors’ heads like the proverbial sword of Damocles — ought to be enough to challenge their constitutionality,” he wrote, according to the News Service.
“Nonetheless, plaintiffs’ suggestion that the amorphous threat defendants play by generally enforcing state laws trickles down to cause their fears of speculative future punishment fails to establish, pursuant to binding precedent, plaintiffs’ standing to challenge Florida’s policy choices.”
Walker dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning it could be refiled if the liberals come up with more solid ground to stand on.
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