Florida told professors what they couldn't teach. Refuse, and the penalty was steep
A federal appeals court just told Florida it can't control what professors say in class - even though it signs their paychecks.
The July 7, 2026 decision from the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld a lower-court order that stops Florida from enforcing part of its Individual Freedom Act against professors at its public colleges and universities. The provision blocked classroom instruction that "espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels" students to accept eight listed ideas about race, color, national origin, and sex - including that one race is "morally superior" to another, or that a person is "inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive."
The setting is a campus, but the lesson reaches any employer that manages what its people say at work - and public employers most of all.
Florida's argument was direct. Because the state pays professors' salaries, it said, their classroom speech belongs to the state, and the state can control it. The court called this a "salary-for-speech rule" and "a breathtaking assertion of power," and declined to go along.
Government employers do get real room to manage what staff say on the job. But the court would not extend that authority to cover every word of a college lecture. A sweeping, up-front ban on disfavored ideas, it said, is a different thing from an everyday decision about one employee.
The enforcement design was hard to miss....
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