The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act as an infringement on professors’ liberties. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) believes the court was mistaken, and we urge the state of Florida to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. More importantly, we urge Florida—and all other states—to keep on working creatively to reform higher education, by all legal means. If one tool does not work, Florida should pick up another.
What is at issue, after all, is mass misconduct by faculty members and administrators at colleges and universities across the nation. They have abandoned their mission to teach and to research and replaced it with political indoctrination in service of a variously denominated ‘woke’ radicalism—i.e., “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), transgenderism, so-called “anti-racism,” and so-called “anti-colonialism”—a goulash of race communism and gender theory, lately garnished with Jew-hatred. The universities failed to regulate themselves in time; now the activists have seized control of the universities’ machinery. Florida and other states are using legislation such as the Stop WOKE Act to require universities to do what honor, shame, and love of learning should prompt them to do of their own volition.
We thought, and think, that Florida’s Stop WOKE Act was lawful—that political blinders explain the appeals court’s decision more than do constitutional principles. We would urge Florida lawmakers, should they wish to take a second bite at the apple, to consider using the language in our model Campus Intellectual Diversity Act. The model Act informed Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, and we think it is well-tailored to survive legal challenge. But then it has not yet been legally challenged. We don’t think Florida was mistaken to go with the language in the Stop WOKE Act; we just think that now it makes sense to try to pass a law with different language.
And we need more than laws. At both the federal and the state level, policymakers should appoint judges who realize that the great threat to liberty comes from the activist university establishment, not from state attempts to restore liberty to our campuses. State policymakers also need to appoint Boards of Trustees and University Presidents who will act to reform public institutions of higher education—and reform the appointment process to remove faculty committees from the selection process, and to ensure that long-lists and short-lists are not confined to DEI true-believers and compliant apparatchiks. They should create autonomous Schools free of the ideological establishment’s control and give them the responsibility to teach American Government and American History general education requirements. They should establish detailed financial transparency for public universities—and make line-item vetoes of university expenditures possible.
Above all, state policymakers need to wield the power of the purse. Public colleges and universities that will not reform should have their funding reduced until they change their ways. If activists insist on turning universities into radical seminaries, and their judicial allies will not allow for sensible reform measures, then higher education reformers should proceed to sterner courses. The ‘woke’ activists cannot be allowed to hold our public universities hostage. They must, indeed, be stopped—and if not by the Stop WOKE Act, then by any other legal means.
Florida has pursued several means to reform higher education, with great success. It should not be discouraged by this setback—and nor should reformers in other states. We always knew that reform legislation would face captious opposition from activist judges. The federal appeals court presents us with a challenge. We have the means to meet it; all we need is imagination and courage.
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash (cropped)