Florida Shows How to Combat Woke Indoctrination on Campus Advocates are kidding themselves if they think free speech is enough to ensure academic freedom. By Joshua Rauh
In the battle for open inquiry on campus, two factions have emerged on the side of free speech. The first camp consists of professors and administrators who consider themselves the true defenders of academic freedom. They seek to create a free-speech consensus in academia across the political spectrum. In the second camp, state legislators seek to restore academic freedom by outlawing advocacy of woke progressivism in schools. This camp views such ideological teaching as discriminatory and outside the bounds of taxpayer-funded education.
A simmering conflict between these two camps has now burst into the open over Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act. In the first camp, the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group of more than 700 university professors from across the U.S., issued a statement against the Florida policy and others of its kind. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, is also opposed to policies that limit classroom discussion, scholarly inquiry and public debate in state universities.
I joined the AFA in 2021 as a founding member. These pages heralded the group’s formation. I share the organization’s stated mission: to “defend faculty members’ freedom of thought and expression” including “freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.” But the idea that supporting academic freedom requires opposing anti-woke legislation is misguided.
The Stop W.O.K.E. Act prohibits faculty at Florida’s public colleges and universities from indoctrinating students with progressive theologies on race, sex and oppression. Faculty at these schools can’t subject students to teaching that argues that members of one race or sex are morally superior to another, that an individual by virtue of his or her race or sex is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, or that an individual’s race or sex necessarily determines his or her moral character. The bill safeguards “training or discussion” on these topics if conducted in an “objective manner without endorsements of the concepts” but prohibits advocacy.
The AFA asserts that the act as written restricts what professors can advocate for when teaching in taxpayer-funded institutions and argues that the First Amendment protects professors’ freedom to advocate. In November, a U.S. District Court ruling in a lawsuit brought by FIRE provided partial support for this reasoning. Judge Mark Walker wrote that “the First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors.”
But the law here is far from settled. Professors at public universities are state employees. In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) the Supreme Court ruled that public employees don’t have unlimited rights under the First Amendment to make whatever statements they want on the job if those statements relate to their professional duties. The court hasn’t said whether this would apply to a case related to scholarship or teaching.
Policy measures that aim to limit the insidious advance of wokeism will ultimately enhance academic freedom. Can dissenting students today really speak up if a professor advocates canceling or expelling people who disagree with woke principles? Universities are compelling speech on these topics. They are requiring students to take classes taught from a highly politicized perspective to graduate. This creates the impression that students’ grades will suffer if they oppose the prevailing classroom narrative.
There are modifications that could improve legislation like the Stop W.O.K.E. Act and make it more robust in restoring open inquiry. Legislators could clarify that professors may assign woke readings so long as they don’t require students to accept those views.
Should state universities really continue to be unaccountable fiefdoms into which legislatures pour taxpayer money? Or do they derive their mandates from democratically elected representatives? A claim to free speech doesn’t give professors immunity as they educate the public in part with taxpayer funds.
That’s where legislation can come in. If universities increasingly fail to safeguard the freedom of faculty to teach, students to learn, and dissenters to be heard, legislatures have an obligation to act. Policy makers can’t allow universities to become incubators of indoctrination and groupthink. They must protect the freedoms required for the constructive conflict that is essential to education while holding universities accountable to the taxpayers who fund them.
True efforts to promote academic freedom would engage with legislation like the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, if only to improve it. Students and taxpayers are better off with this legislation than without it.
Mr. Rauh is a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-founder of the Global Liberty Institute.
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