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Instead of the state determining what will be taught in university classrooms, students must be free to hear and consider even officially disfavored ideas presented to them by professors, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

More than two years after oral arguments in a case challenging the 2022 law dubbed the Stop WOKE Act, two out of three judges on a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit panel affirmed two lower courts’ rulings that the law is unconstitutional.

The Stop WOKE Act tried to curb teaching identity-based content such as Critical Race Theory, which experts say is about “acknowledging how racial disparities are embedded in U.S. history and society.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis, at the time amassing a record he would cite while running for the GOP nomination for president, wanted to stop what he called “indoctrination” in classrooms.

“The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not. Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves,” Judge Britt Grant, an nominee of President Donald Trump, wrote for the majority in a 52-page ruling.

Federal Appeals Court Calls Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” a “First Amendment Sin”

Judge Charles Wilson, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, joined Grant in the majority.

The law prohibited teaching that “promotes” or “compels” students to believe eight concepts spelled out in statute, including:

That any race is “morally superior.”

That anyone is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive.”

Someone is responsible for actions committed in the past by members of their race.

That “such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist.”

Grant questioned how one might referee alleged violations of the law.

“Just to name one, what does ‘morally superior’ encompass, and against whose perspective is it measured?” she wondered.

The 11th Circuit had already ruled part of that same law unconstitutional in 2024 — the piece prohibiting mandatory private workplace trainings endorsing diversity based on race, sex, and nationality.

“The language here is identical, but the academic context puts us at an unprecedented First Amendment intersection: viewpoint discrimination meets public-employee speech, meets government speech, meets academic freedom,” Grant wrote.

It was the second loss before the 11th Circuit for the DeSantis administration on a “woke” higher education issue in as many days.

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

The Phoenix has asked representatives of DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier for comment but hasn’t heard back yet.

Uthmeier did comment on X: “According to the CA11 panel majority, public university professors........

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