What Florida's Illegitimate "Stop WOKE Act" Ruling means for Texas
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
July 18, 2026
The federal courts have now said plainly what many educators, students, civil rights advocates, and defenders of academic freedom have been saying for years: the state cannot turn the university classroom into an ideological command center.
As reported by Politico, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit struck down key higher education provisions of Florida’s so-called Stop WOKE Act, the 2022 law championed by Governor Ron DeSantis to restrict how race, gender, white privilege, systemic racism, sexism, and related concepts could be taught in public colleges and universities. The ruling is a major blow to one of the signature laws in the anti-DEI, anti-“woke,” anti-academic freedom playbook.
The court’s language is striking. Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, called Florida’s theory a “breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in the very classrooms where students are supposed to wrestle with difficult ideas (Atterbury, 2026). The court also stated that, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it" (Atterbury, 2026).
That language matters. It refuses the cynical argument that because professors at public universities are paid by the state, their teaching becomes government speech. In other words, the state cannot simply say: “We pay your salary, therefore we own your mind, your syllabus, your interpretation of history, and your professional judgment.”
This is not a small legal technicality. It is a profound defense of the university as a space of inquiry.
The Stop WOKE Act sought to regulate not simply what could be said, but which perspectives could be made available to students. It targeted concepts involving racism, sexism, privilege, unconscious bias, and systemic inequality, while imposing serious institutional and employment penalties.
The Legal Defense Fund noted that violations carried potentially severe consequences: universities could lose access to state performance funding, while individual instructors could face dismissal. The ACLU’s case describes the law as a classroom censorship measure that severely restricted educators and students from learning and talking about race and gender in higher education classrooms.
This ruling therefore speaks beyond Florida. It speaks to a broader authoritarian impulse in state policy: the effort to use legislative power to chill teaching, narrow curriculum, punish dissent, intimidate faculty, and erase the histories and lived experiences of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, LGBTQIA+, women, immigrant, and other marginalized communities.
For Florida, the decision is a repudiation of a governing strategy that has treated public higher education as a battlefield for culture war politics. The state’s attack on “wokeness” has not been about intellectual openness. It has been about control—control over language, history, curriculum, faculty governance, hiring, student support, and institutional mission.
Florida has become a testing ground for this politics, from the Stop WOKE Act to the hostile takeover of New College of Florida. The goal has been to remake public higher education not as a democratic public good, but as an instrument of state ideology. The Eleventh Circuit ruling interrupts that project and reaffirms that the First Amendment still has something to say when politicians attempt to police the boundaries of knowledge.
For Texas, the ruling should be read carefully.
Texas’ SB 17 is not identical to Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. SB 17 focuses primarily on banning diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, programs, required DEI statements, and certain DEI-related activities at public institutions of higher education. The University of Texas at Austin describes SB 17 as a law that prohibits public institutions from engaging in specified DEI activities, effective January 1, 2024. The enrolled bill itself amends the Texas Education Code to regulate “diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions of higher education.”
Still, the family resemblance is unmistakable. Florida’s law and Texas’ law emerge from the same national movement. Both are premised on the idea that state legislatures should decide which institutional commitments to equity are permissible, which histories may be taught without fear, which student supports may exist, and which words become suspect.
The consequences of SB 17 were already severe within months of its implementation. On May 14, 2024, then–University of Texas System Chancellor J. B. Milliken testified before the Texas Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education that UT institutions had closed 21 DEI offices, eliminated 311 full- and part-time positions that had previously focused on DEI, and canceled 681 contracts, programs, and trainings. Milliken estimated that more than $25 million had been saved or redirected to other university purposes. These figures came from Milliken’s legislative testimony—not from a separate UT System report—and were documented in the official Senate hearing and contemporary reporting by KUT (Fogel, 2026).
The Florida ruling does not automatically invalidate Texas’ SB 17. But it does send an unmistakable warning: when state policy crosses from governance into viewpoint discrimination, when it chills academic speech, when it punishes institutions or educators for making certain ideas available to students, it enters dangerous constitutional territory.
This is especially important because anti-DEI laws rarely operate only through their text. They operate through fear. They invite over-compliance. They encourage administrators to preemptively close programs, cancel events, rename offices, erase webpages, avoid words, discipline faculty, and interpret the law more broadly than required in order to avoid political retaliation.
That is how censorship works in practice. It does not always arrive as a direct order. Sometimes it arrives as a memo, a compliance training, a legislative hearing, a threat to funding, or a phone call from someone who “just wants to make sure” the university understands the political climate.
The Eleventh Circuit’s ruling pushes back against this climate of fear. It reminds us that public universities are not simply agencies of the state. They are institutions with a democratic function: to cultivate inquiry, foster debate, preserve knowledge, produce research, and educate students capable of thinking critically about the world they inherit.
That democratic function is especially urgent in states like Florida and Texas, where demographic change, racial inequality, attacks on public education, and struggles over curriculum are deeply intertwined. The fight over DEI is not only about university bureaucracy or so-called "viewpoint diversity." It is about whether public institutions will tell the truth about our histories and prepare students to build a more just future.
The deeper question is who gets to decide what students are allowed to know?
If politicians can ban disfavored ideas in the name of “anti-discrimination,” then anti-discrimination law itself is turned upside down. Rather than protecting people from exclusion, it becomes a weapon for suppressing conversations about exclusion. Rather than expanding freedom, it narrows the intellectual life of the university.
That is why this ruling matters. It reasserts the university as a place where difficult ideas may be confronted rather than prohibited, where professors exercise professional judgment rather than serve as instruments of the state, and where education prepares students for democratic thought—not political obedience.
For Florida, the ruling is a devastating rebuke to the DeSantis administration’s effort to govern higher education through ideological prohibition.
For Texas, it is a cautionary signal that laws targeting DEI, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, race-conscious inquiry, and academic freedom may face serious constitutional scrutiny when they attempt to control speech, viewpoint, curriculum, or the conditions under which faculty and students pursue knowledge.
And for the rest of us, it is a reminder that higher education must be defended not only as a workplace or a credentialing system, but as one of the remaining public spaces where democracy can still be practiced.
This decision does not end the struggle. Florida may continue to litigate. Texas lawmakers may continue to expand their attacks. Other states may refine their strategies. But the ruling gives educators, students, civil rights groups, faculty organizations, and communities a powerful language of resistance.
A university worthy of the name cannot be built on state-mandated silence.
It must be a place where students can ask hard questions, where faculty can teach with integrity, where histories of racism and resistance are not erased, and where the freedom to learn is understood as inseparable from the freedom to teach.
That is the meaning of this ruling. And that is why it matters far beyond Florida.
There's a lot more to the policy context, of course, with other bills like SB 12 and SB 37 at play, the former restricting instruction, programming, student support, and educator conduct in K–12 schools, and the latter impacting faculty governance, changing controls curricula and academic programs. The cumulative effect is a vertically integrated system of ideological control stretching from prekindergarten through graduate education.
References
Atterbury, A. (2026, July 7). “Breathtaking assertion of power”: Appeals court slams door on Florida “Stop WOKE” law championed by DeSantis,Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/07/florida-desantis-stop-woke-law-ruling-00988728
Fogel, B. (2024, May 14). Are public universities doing enough to comply with Texas’ DEI ban? Lawmakers will decide, KUT 90.5. https://www.kut.org/education/2024-05-14/are-public-universities-doing-enough-to-comply-with-texas-dei-ban-lawmakers-will-decide
Pernell v. Commissioner of the Florida State Board of Education, Nos. 22-13992, 22-13994 & 23-10616 (11th Cir. July 7, 2026). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/23-10616/23-10616-2026-07-07.html
Texas Legislature. (2025). Senate Bill 12, 89th Legislature, Regular Session: Enrolled version.
Texas Legislature. (2025). Senate Bill 37, 89th Legislature, Regular Session: Enrolled version.
Texas Senate, Subcommittee on Higher Education. (2024, May 14). Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education [Video recording].
The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE act touted by the DeSantis administration.
Florida’s Legislature approved the “anti-woke” legislation touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022. The state, though, has been blocked from enforcing the policies ever since. | Lynne Sladky/AP
By Andrew Atterbury
07/07/2026 02:25 PM EDT|Updated: 07/07/2026 05:35 PM EDT
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Florida’s anti-woke law restricting how lessons on race and gender can be taught in colleges and universities — policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — violates the free speech rights of professors, a panel of appeals court judges ruled Tuesday.
The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE Act touted by the DeSantis administration. The judges affirmed a 2022 decision that labeled Florida’s rules as “positively dystopian,” doubling down by arguing the law is “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in the very classroom space where students are supposed to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Judge Britt C. Grant, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote in the opinion.
Grant was joined by Judge Charles R. Wilson, a Bill Clinton appointee, in the ruling. But another Trump-appointed judge, Barbara Lagoa — a former Florida Supreme Court judge picked by DeSantis — wrote a striking dissent of the decision, contending the First Amendment “does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”
“This panel is not free to rewrite precedent simply because we dislike where it leads,” Lagoa wrote.
Florida’s Republican-led Legislature approved the “anti-woke” legislation, H.B. 7, or the Individual Freedom Act, in 2022. The state, though, has been blocked from enforcing the policies as it has been fighting in court ever since.
Directly inspired by DeSantis, the law expanded Florida’s anti-discrimination laws to prohibit schools and companies from leveling guilt or blame to students and employees based on race or sex. As such, it targets lessons over issues like “white privilege” by creating new protections for students and workers, including that a person should not be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin.
The other portion of Florida’s law restricting what DeSantis called “woke” workplace trainings faced a similar fate after also being rejected by an 11th Circuit panel. And, notably, it was Grant who wrote that opinion, decrying the DeSantis-backed policies as “the greatest First Amendment sin” for penalizing certain viewpoints on the job.
Tuesday’s higher education ruling was triggered by two lawsuits that have been fighting the Stop WOKE law for years. One of the lawsuits was filed by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit free speech group, on behalf of a University of South Florida professor, student, and student group, while the other was brought by the ACLU, ACLU of Florida and Legal Defense Fund on behalf of students and educators.
Both challenges alleged that the legislation pushed by DeSantis violates their freedom of speech, evidenced by how it could restrict lessons on critical topics, claiming it’s a discriminatory classroom censorship law that severely restricts how race and gender can be taught and talked about in schools.
“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, said in a statement Tuesday.
FIRE, meanwhile, also celebrated the decision and its implications for higher education:
“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,” said Greg H. Greubel, FIRE senior attorney.
The DeSantis administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ruling. State Attorney General James Uthmeier, though, did throw praise at Lagoa.
“Barbara Lagoa may be the best jurist in our country,” Uthmeier said on social media. “She should be on SCOTUS.”
