Florida is Working to Roll Back a Century of Academic Freedom Protections
Academic freedom is under attack across the United States, but nowhere more so than in Florida.
In January, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) announced six new appointees to the board of New College of Florida, a small liberal arts institution in Sarasota. The team’s apparent mandate, which conservative activist Christopher Rufo — one of the new board members — described as a “hostage-rescue operation,” is “to change everything from the school’s curriculum to its departments and its faculty.”
Later that month, the Florida Department of Education announced it would not permit a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in the state’s public schools because it violates Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” enacted last year. This came as Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez (R-Fla.) announced the state’s intention to “curb” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at Florida’s public colleges and universities.
But the gravest threat to academic freedom comes from a legal argument Florida has advanced in defense of the Stop WOKE Act. The legislation is part of a wave of “educational gag orders” banning the teaching of “divisive concepts.” Violations can trigger disciplinary action against faculty and enormous fines for their universities. In a brief filed in federal court, Florida’s lawyers contend that faculty at public universities are government employees, in-classroom speech is “government speech” and the state “has simply chosen to regulate its own speech” with the Stop WOKE Act.
Calling Florida’s argument “positively dystopian,” and noting it would give Florida “unfettered authority to muzzle its professors,” the district court temporarily barred enforcement of the statute. But Florida has appealed, and the ultimate outcome of the case is uncertain.
If deemed constitutional, Florida's statute would overturn more than a century of progress in the development of academic freedom, which has helped American universities achieve global preeminence.
The concept began to emerge in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War, when breakthroughs in science, medicine and other academic disciplines spurred the rise of research universities dedicated to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge. At the same time, faculty members began to conceive of themselves as members of a learned profession with distinctive standards. They adapted concepts of freedom of teaching, inquiry and learning from their German counterparts.
But academic freedom did not immediately take hold. In the early 1900s, most American universities were still, in the words of scholar Robert C. Post, “owned and operated by churches, by private proprietary owners or by the state.” Faculty were seen as employees who could be dismissed for embarrassing their institution, offending trustees or alienating donors. In 1900, for example, Jane Stanford, the widow of Leland Stanford and Stanford University’s sole trustee, directed its president to dismiss a prominent economist, Edward A. Ross, because he advocated abandoning the gold standard and restricting immigration in ways that were both racist and inconsistent with Leland Stanford’s past railroad interests.