Court Delivers Blow to DeSantis’ Higher Ed Agenda in Stop W.O.K.E. Act Ruling

A federal appeals court has struck down the higher education provisions of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Stop W.O.K.E. Act – a controversial law that critics decried as censorship but which conservative supporters argued was necessary to stop ideological creep into the classroom.

Florida A&M University College of Law professor LeRoy Pernell – an unapologetic proponent of Critical Race Theory who agreed to serve as lead named plaintiff in the case – hailed the 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit as a victory for academic freedom.

“We are thrilled the court has stopped the erasure of topics that have real implications for our students, allowing them to learn, discuss, and develop tools for combatting the complex issue of racism in our country without being gagged by those who would dictate that only state-approved thought may be promoted,” Pernell said in a statement released through the Legal Defense Fund, which along with the ACLU helped file the lawsuit on Pernell’s behalf in 2022.

LeRoy Pernell, J.D.In its decision, the appellate court ruled that the Stop W.O.K.E. Act – formally known as the Individual Freedom Act – went too far in its efforts to control how professors at public institutions discuss and present topics such as race, gender and oppression in the classroom.

“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,” Judge Britt Grant, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2018. “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.

“The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not,” Britt continued. “Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”

The decision represents a blow to one of DeSantis’ signature efforts to assert more control over Florida’s public colleges and universities. When DeSantis introduced the Stop W.O.K.E. Act in 2021, he touted it as the “strongest legislation of its kind in the nation” and said it would “take on both corporate wokeness and Critical Race Theory.” Critical Race Theory holds that racism is not just something that is expressed as individual bias or prejudiced but rather is deeply embedded in law and policy.