DeSantis-Backed Ban on ‘Woke’ College Lessons Defeated on Appeal
Florida’s “anti-woke” restrictions on the way university professors teach about race and gender violate the professors’ First Amendment rights, a panel of Eleventh Circuit judges decided.
The ruling affirms a federal district court judge’s finding that the law was impermissible under the Constitution. A divided 2-1 panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit said state lawmakers can set the curriculum for state-run universities but don’t have unlimited authority to restrict viewpoints the lawmakers find offensive.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/desantis-backed-ban-on-woke-college-lessons-defeated-on-appealOpen linkView original on sh.itjust.works
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This was, as expected, a straightforward case implicating the free speech rights of university professors. But I want to briefly highlight the absurdity found in the dissenting opinion:
The subsequently cited cases do not agree with this proposition, and the only times when the government/university overcomes a professor's free-speech rights is: 1) when a non-tenure instructor is not rehired, and a non-viewpoint rationale can be given, or 2) when an instructor's speech would be confused with what the university wants to (or cannot) teach; this typically arises when an instructor endorses a religion, but the same First Amendment prohibits the university from endorsing the same.
Neither of these situations arose in the present case. And in any circumstance, the dissent's pronouncement is a bad stretch: when it comes to k-12 schools, rote instruction is the norm and maybe that can be called "the zenith" of the state's control over instructors. But for universities, current First Amendment jurisprudence -- as the majority opinion correctly describes -- honors the flexibility that professors must have in order to teach young adults about the world. University is anything but rote, so whatever "zenith" must wane.
That the dissent then spills much ink about "academic freedom" not existing in American law until the 1950s, that's both ahistorical and beside the point: the majority resolved the case using the law of today. The dissent seems to want to apply the law as of pre-1850s.
It is a farce when conservatives mention "activist judges", since apparently it's only activism when the judges apply modern jurisprudence, but somehow it's no problem when judges ignore decades-old precedence, write opinions based on bad history and bad law, and mis-cite cases for their lousy propositions.
As a continuing annoyance of mine, we the public are somehow supposed to treat each judicial opinion as having equal weight, and yet it's clearly obvious with sufficient reading comprehension that some opinions are thorough departures from the present reality. Yes, this is a victory for the appellant, but quite frankly it should be disqualifying for the dissent to produce such garbage in the name of the judiciary.
IMO, there should be the means to remove bad opinions from publication, the same way that scientific journals retract papers that turn out to be bunk. It doesn't delete an opinion from existence, but would be an expression that the higher court (or Congress) gives no oxygen to such balderdash.