The Freedom to Be Woke

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.