Federal Judge Blocks Florida’s College CRT Ban — DeSantis Fight Continues

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A federal appeals court blocked Florida’s ban on critical race theory indoctrination in state colleges Tuesday — handing the ACLU a win and setting up a potential Supreme Court showdown.

The ruling targets the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act — the Stop WOKE Act — which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in 2022 to keep CRT ideology out of Florida classrooms and workplaces.

In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Florida’s restrictions on CRT in public colleges violate the First Amendment. Two professors, students, and a student group sued, backed by the ACLU and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“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.”

Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, wrote that opinion. Judge Charles R. Wilson, a Clinton appointee, joined her.

Grant continued: “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”

Critical race theory is a Marxist ideology claiming all American institutions — government, economy, culture — rest on racial hierarchy with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Even race-neutral policies are secretly racist, CRT adherents argue.

Republicans have been fighting CRT’s spread into schools and workplaces since the 2020 Black Lives Matter summer.

Judge Barbara Lagoa — also a Trump appointee — dissented hard. She argued Florida has every right to regulate what state employees teach in state-funded classrooms.

“The professor-plaintiffs are state employees, and the speech at issue here occurs during their state-sponsored instruction in a course taken for credit by students enrolled in the State’s public universities.”

Lagoa wrote that the majority’s ruling creates an “unworkable” judge-made test that reduces the First Amendment to “judicial preference” — ignoring the state’s legitimate interest in what gets taught in its own classrooms.

“The First Amendment protects all viewpoints in the public square, whether they are conventional or uncontroversial,” Lagoa continued. “But it does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”

She pointed to Supreme Court precedent: if the government has a compelling interest in eradicating racial discrimination at a private religious university, Florida’s interest in stopping what it deems racial discrimination in its own state classrooms is even stronger.

“We need not agree or disagree with Florida that the viewpoints at issue here constitute racial discrimination; we need only acknowledge that the State is allowed to decide what is endorsed by its professors in its own classrooms,” Lagoa wrote.

The ACLU and FIRE celebrated the ruling.

“Today’s important decision means that college remains a place where professors and students are allowed to debate controversial topics — even if politicians disagree with them,” FIRE senior attorney Greg H. Greubel said.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier fired back on X, calling the ruling “totally incoherent and inconsistent with the intent of the First Amendment.”

He praised Lagoa: “Barbara Lagoa may be the best jurist in our country. She should be on SCOTUS.”

The split decision leaves Florida an opening to seek a rehearing or appeal directly to the Supreme Court.

The case is Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors of the State University System, No. 22-13992 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

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