Today a federal court halted enforcement of key parts of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” in the state’s public universities, declaring that the law violates the First Amendment rights of students and faculty.
The court ruled that the “positively dystopian” act “officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints.” The court invoked George Orwell to drive home that if “liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
In September, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit challenging Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. FIRE’s lawsuit, on behalf of a professor, student, and a student group, argued that the higher education provisions of the act unconstitutionally chill free expression and mandate faculty censorship on the state’s college campuses.
“It is a happy day not only for Sam and me, but for the institutions of this country,” said FIRE plaintiff Adriana Novoa, a University of South Florida history professor of 17 years. “I hope that the courts will defend the existence of a public education that cannot be manipulated by politicians to push any ideology, now and in the future.”
[This looked like an overreach from its inception. Rational limits on curricula in elementary schools are unobjectionable, but blocking topic discussions among adults is counter to free-speech principles no matter what viewpoint is being suppressed. — Ed]
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