Florida’s state colleges and universities begin the fall semester on Monday, and a blockbuster court ruling made earlier this summer might have an impact on what students will be discussing in their classrooms.
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The Stop WOKE Act has been struck down.
HB 7 was controversial from the start. The governor named it the Stop WOKE Act, the legislature passed it into law in 2022, and soon after, a federal judge said it violated the First Amendment. In July, an appeals court voted 2-1 to uphold the lower court’s ruling.
The appellate court reaffirmed the right of college professors to discuss topics such as race and gender with their students, even if politicians don’t approve.
“I was thrilled to see them uphold First Amendment rights and freedom from viewpoint discrimination,” said Dr. Zachary Levenson, a sociology professor at Florida International University.
He says the Stop WOKE Act wasn’t driven by academics, but rather by politics.
“People with no educational background were attempting to dictate, quite literally, course content and prohibit other content from being taught without any basis for making that assertion other than their own politics,” Levenson said.
By banning so-called critical race theory and other concepts dealing with diversity, equity and inclusion, the court ruled the law was a “Breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas…”
Gov. Ron DeSantis supported the law as a way to promote Western civilization, saying the state has the right to stop what he calls ideological agendas and indoctrination on campus.
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“They really want to tear at the fabric of our society and our culture,” DeSantis said at an event promoting the law a couple of years ago.
“Completely alien to me, I’ve never encountered it in a classroom,” Levenson said, in reference to the governor’s criticism.
Responding with a tweet to the court’s ruling in July, DeSantis called it judicial overreach.
“We’ve seen so many institutions get corrupted by ideology, and universities have been perhaps the most common. The Constitution does not block us from fighting back against these ideological fads and from ensuring that our institutions stand on a solid intellectual foundation,” he wrote.
Even with the court’s ruling, Levenson says a chilling effect remains.
“Professors are terrified; this is a climate nationally where professors are being suspended and fired, including in Florida,” he said.
Levenson says faculty all over Florida are self-censoring how they teach because they’re afraid of reprisals from their administrations.
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