Federal appeals court blocks parts of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling preventing enforcement of portions of the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the Stop WOKE Act, affecting higher education.

The law, which took effect in 2022, would have prohibited professors at Florida’s public universities and colleges from endorsing certain ideologies about race and sex. Some of the issues they were barred from promoting included the idea that people of one race, color, national origin or sex were morally superior to others, that a person can be inherently racist or sexist based on their race, that their moral character is tied to their race, national origin or sex, and other similar ideologies.

While professors were barred from promoting these ideas, they would have been permitted to discuss them in an objective manner.

Several groups of professors challenged the law based on the First Amendment.

“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. We affirm the district court’s preliminary injunction,” wrote 11th Circuit Judge Britt Grant wrote.

Judge Barbara Lagoa dissented from the majority’s opinion.

“Taken together, these authorities make clear that Florida’s public universities speak and act subject to the State’s control and administration,” wrote Lagoa. “Indeed, the [Individual Freedom Act] functions as the State’s directive to its own employees, setting the standards that govern classroom instruction when, as Florida puts it, they teach “the State’s curriculum, in the State’s classrooms, on the State’s time, in return for a State paycheck.”

It’s not the first legal challenge the Stop WOKE Act has faced. The law impacted not only rules surrounding public education but also employment, making it unlawful for employers to require their employees to participate in training or activities that promote those concepts related to race and sex.

It also set up parameters around K-12 instruction, barring indoctrination of those ideas.

Judge Grant said while states traditionally exercise a “great deal of control” on K-12 instruction, the approach is generally more limited when it comes to higher education.

“Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is 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—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth,” wrote Grant. “This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”