Some states have responded to the excesses of professors in their state university systems with legislation intended to stop woke indoctrination in classrooms. That, naturally, has led to lawsuits.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor James Rogers looks at two cases (one in Florida, the other from Alabama) where the judges reached opposite conclusions.
He begins:
When professors in public universities teach their classes, are they engaged in government speech pursuant to their job duties, with First Amendment rights equal only to those of other government employees, or does “academic freedom” provide public-university professors with protections that are broader than those shared by other government employees? Two federal district courts in the Eleventh Circuit (which includes the states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) recently came to opposite conclusions on this question.
In the Florida case, the judge granted an injunction against the state law; in the Alabama case, the judge declined to do so. The issue is whether professors enjoy free speech rights that extend beyond the First Amendment rights of all public employees.
In explaining the two decisions, Rogers writes:
Walker concluded that Florida’s law conflated its “right to make content-based choices . . . with unfettered discretion in limiting a professor’s ability to express certain viewpoints about the content of the curriculum once it has been set.” So Walker enjoined enforcement of Florida’s law.
In contrast, Judge Proctor read the cases differently and refused to enjoin Alabama’s law. (I should note that the Alabama law is not identical to the Florida law, and that may partly account for the different outcomes in the cases. Nonetheless, the two judges did reach dramatically different conclusions regarding the pertinence of academic freedom as an asserted legal right in the two cases.)
These are just preliminary rulings, but the cases are worth watching. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to make the final decision.