Federal appeals court reviews Florida's Stop WOKE law

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Photo via Ron DeSantis/Twitter

Grappling with questions of government power and academic freedom, a federal appeals court heard arguments Friday in a battle over a 2022 Florida law that restricts how race-related concepts can be taught in colleges. state universities — a law that Gov. Ron DeSantis has dubbed “Stop. WAKED Act. »

The state appealed after Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction in November 2022 against the law, which he said violated First Amendment rights.

Charles Cooper, an attorney for the state, told a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during Friday’s hearing that the state has the authority to make choices regarding the content of university courses. He argued that legal precedents uphold the constitutionality of the law.

“There are plenty of cases where the government can have a point of view,” Cooper said.

But Leah Watson, an attorney for the college professors who challenged the law, disputed Cooper’s arguments and said the law’s purpose “is solely to suppress disfavored views.” She emphasized academic freedom and said universities, not Parliament, should enforce standards.

“Classroom teaching is not government speech,” said Watson, lead attorney for the ACLU’s racial justice program.

Decisions in such cases usually take months.

DeSantis made the law a priority, which he called the “Stop Harm to Our Children and Employees Act” or “Stop WOKE Act.” In recent years, he has frequently criticized what he calls “indoctrination” in education and helped overhaul New College of Florida — part of the state university system — in an attempt to make it more conservative.

The law lists a series of race-related concepts and states that it would constitute discrimination if students are subjected to instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, instills, or requires” them to believe those concepts.

For example, the law classifies teaching as discriminatory if students are led to believe that they bear “responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or subjected to unfavorable treatment because of actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, nationality.” origin or sex.

As another example, the law seeks to prohibit teaching that would cause students to “experience guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress due to actions, in which the person played no part.” role, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin or sex.

But in issuing the preliminary injunction, Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, called the law “positively dystopian” and said it was “antithetical to academic freedom and it cast a heavy veil of orthodoxy over the state universities of Florida.”

Walker also separately issued a preliminary injunction against a portion of the law that placed restrictions on the treatment of race-related issues in workplace training. In March, an appeals court panel upheld the injunction.

But a key question during Friday’s hearing centered on how much authority the Legislature has to decide what is said in the state’s classrooms. Justice Barbara Lagoa, for example, said a university is an “inherently state institution” and that the issue involves the speech of state employees.

Justice Charles Wilson, meanwhile, seemed skeptical of the state’s arguments, citing in particular what he described as an “academic freedom exception” to the government’s speech restrictions.

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