In the never-ending debate about freedom of speech on college campuses, conservatives have long condemned “cancel culture,” an attitude of intolerance toward conservative ideas. They are not wrong that liberal and left-wing views predominate at many top universities, and that many students and some faculty resist exposure to ideas they oppose. And to the extent that “wokeness” implies that only certain views are permissible on sensitive subjects such as race and sexual orientation, conservatives rightly complain that the concept is at odds with basic commitments to free expression and inquiry that should govern in the university setting.The response to a culture of intolerance by students and faculty, however, should not be official intolerance by the state. Yet that is exactly what Florida did when, in 2022, it enacted the Stop WOKE Act, a law aimed at excising what its proponents call “critical race theory” from state university classrooms. The law prohibits public university professors and K-12 teachers from endorsing eight proscribed ideas about race, sex, and national origin, including the view that people of a particular race should “receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.” Under that provision, a professor could not express his opinion that Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action at Harvard had the better of the argument.So conservatives and liberals alike should be cheering the decision on July 7 from the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit declaring unconstitutional the Stop WOKE Act’s application to university professors. (As national legal director of the ACLU, I worked on this case for the challengers.) Yet the case divided two Trump appointees. Judge Britt Grant, a former clerk to then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, wrote the majority opinion, and Judge Barbara Lagoa filed an impassioned dissent. (A Clinton appointee, Judge Charles Wilson, sided with Grant.) The decision, the most important affirmation of academic freedom in decades, reflects a fundamental divide among conservatives on free speech—between those who are committed to the ideal across the board, and those who champion it for ideas they approve but are only too happy to silence speech they disfavor.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and its legislature clearly fall in the latter camp. Over the past five years they have taken a range of steps to assert unprecedented political control over the state’s institutions of higher education: filling the Board of Governors, which oversees the university system, with DeSantis cronies and Republican politicians; forbidding any Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs; requiring tenured professors to undergo five-year reviews conducted not by their peers but by the school’s politicized administration; and removing certain courses from required curricula, including Introduction to Sociology.The Stop WOKE Act is the capstone of this scheme to remake public universities along political lines. In addition to the notion that affirmative action may be justified, the eight “concepts” the law proscribes include the view that “members of one race, color, national origin, or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, national origin, or sex.” That provision could prohibit teaching about implicit bias and the cognitive inevitability of stereotyping. Another prohibits any endorsement of the concept that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.” Efforts to teach about the continuing effects of the legacy of slavery and discrimination, or the idea that reparations may be owed, could well violate that ban. In all, the prohibitions seem designed to chill almost any effort to discuss, among other things, the nation’s obligation to address the racism on which it was founded.After a group of professors sued, Florida defended the law by arguing that when public university professors speak on the job they are speaking for the state, and therefore the government can control what they say. (The case did not present the issue of the law’s validity in the K-12 setting.) It is generally true that public employers can direct what their employees say when performing their jobs. For example, the governor can require his press secretary to defend his views, and can fire her if she does otherwise. But public university professors are different. No one thinks that a professor teaching organic chemistry, French poetry, or Enlightenment philosophy at the University of Florida is expressing the state’s official views on these subjects (if it even has any). It’s no different for those teaching law, history, or political science. University professors are not mouthpieces for government propaganda. This does not mean that professors are free to say whatever they want in the classroom. Public universities can determine the content of their curricula and enforce professional standards. If a professor refuses to teach the subject she is assigned, or harasses a student, the university can discipline the teacher. Similarly, there is no right to teach views contrary to professional standards—the idea that the Holocaust did not happen, say, or that the earth is flat. But defending the concept of affirmative action, teaching about implicit bias, or maintaining that reparations are owed to the descendants of enslaved people is protected speech. And the state has no interest in micromanaging the viewpoint a professor expresses on the subjects she is hired to teach, so long as those views are consistent with professional standards.Academic freedom, which the Supreme Court has described as a “special concern” of the First Amendment, protects universities and their faculty from partisan interference and political control. The principle recognizes that free inquiry is essential to the search for truth, and therefore forbids the state from casting a “pall of orthodoxy over the classroom” by dictating the views a professor can or cannot express within her assigned subject. This protects private universities from untoward meddling by politicians. But it is just as essential in public universities. Indeed, one of the Supreme Court’s most significant academic freedom cases, Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), struck down a New York law barring Communists from teaching in state universities.Florida’s position, if accepted, would be the end of academic freedom in public colleges, because no university can function as a center of learning if politicians micromanage what faculty can say to their students in class. As Grant put it,