Connect the Dots 101

Three University of Florida professors have been barred from assisting plaintiffs in a lawsuit to overturn the state’s new law restricting voting rights, lawyers said in a federal court filing on Friday. The ban is an extraordinary limit on speech that raises questions of academic freedom and First Amendment rights.

University officials told the three that because the school was a state institution, participating in a lawsuit against the state “is adverse to U.F.’s interests” and could not be permitted….

One lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case, Kira Romero-Craft, said that reasoning “goes against the core of what the University of Florida should stand for in terms of academic freedom….”

An author of two books on academic freedom, Henry Reichman, called the state’s new restrictions “crazy.”

“The whole purpose of a university and academic freedom is to allow scholars free rein to conduct research,” said Mr. Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay.

“The ultimate logic of this is that you can be an expert in the United States, except in the state where you’re actually working and being paid by the state.”

Robert C. Post, a Yale Law School professor and expert on academic freedom and the First Amendment, said he knew of no other case in which a university had imposed prior restraint on a professor’s ability to speak.

“The university does not exist to protect the governor,” he said. “It exists to serve the public. It is an independent institution to serve the public good, and nothing could be more to the public good than a professor telling the truth to the public under oath….”

In an Oct. 13 letter to university officials, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Florida branch noted that Mr. DeSantis had signed legislation this year requiring universities to annually assess the state of academic freedom and ensure that students hear a variety of viewpoints, including those they disagree with.

Barring the professors’ testimony goes against those very tenets, the letter stated, adding that the university “simply should not be looking to Governor DeSantis to decide which speech activities it will engage in. That is precisely the opposite of the values that universities are thought to stand for.”

www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/us/florida-professors-voting-rights-lawsuit.html