Over the last 3 years, the advocacy organization Speech First has filed six lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of bias response teams on the grounds that they violate free speech. Bias response teams are university-wide committees that respond to reports of racially charged incidents on college campuses to promote institutional goals of…

Intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity are hotly debated topics in academia, marked by an increase in legislation focusing on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity within academic settings. This study explores the impact of Florida House Bill 233 on public universities, including academics' morale. House Bill 233 purports to support…

During the 2021, 2022, and 2023 state legislative sessions more than one hundred and fifty bills were introduced seeking to actively undermine academic freedom and university autonomy. This includes nearly one hundred academic gag orders affecting higher education, such as those restricting the teaching of "critical race theory" (CRT)…

David Blacker points to a problematic decline in personal freedoms, including student speech rights: "[A]s the 'educational mission' of schools moves ineluctably even further toward warehousing and surveillance--pre-jail--then remaining intra-institutional speech rights will easily be quashed." Critical of the elastic conception of…

Florida's governor and legislature have mounted a multipronged assault on the intellectual autonomy of Florida's public colleges and universities. Florida is not alone, and Governor DeSantis' political success is already a model for other red-state governors to follow. Higher education leaders must find compelling ways to argue that the pursuit of…

One month after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, left three dead and many injured and arrested, another university faces a tough decision about whether to allow controversial alt-right leader, Richard Spencer, to speak on campus. What seems like a simple decision to allow or deny a speaking request becomes a much deeper…

The past few years have seen an increase in partisan political attempts to restrict the public education curriculum and to portray some forms of public education as a social harm. Two targets are particularly evident: teaching about the history, policies, and actions of the state of Israel and teaching about the history and perpetuation of racism…

This study was an analysis of how Florida Public Schools have interpreted the First Amendment when creating policy to address teachers' and students' activity on social media outside of school hours. The researcher examined the district policies of Florida's school districts and compared those with state mandates. The study includes an overview of…

In November 2022, Florida governor Ronald DeSantis, won reelection by a decisive margin and the Republican party gained supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. During the governor's first term and after reelection, the Florida House and Senate passed legislation and the DeSantis administration took executive actions that further…

In the fall of 2017, the University of Florida (UF) and the city of Gainesville were part of a coda to a terrible event in recent U.S. history: the violent torch-wielding rally of white supremacists and extreme far-right groups in the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, that left three people dead and at least 33 injured. These events…

Some private, religious schools that accept vouchers have been accused of discriminating against certain populations of students through their admissions processes. Discriminating against disfavored groups (e.g., racial minorities, LGBT students, students with disabilities, religious minorities) in voucher programs raises both legal and policy…

The First Amendment to the Constitution is a cornerstone of American democracy and students, like all members of the nation, are entitled to its protections. This study investigates the level of knowledge of students' First Amendment rights among secondary preservice teachers in various disciplines and their confidence in dealing with First…

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public…

In the twenty-first century, differences in the treatment of trade in alcoholic beverages in comparison to other commercial goods seem at odds with the federal regulation of interstate trade under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, which prohibits "differential treatment of in-state and out-of-state economic interests that…

River Run High School, located in rural west central Florida, was the site for a case study of student conflict precipitated by the wearing and display of Confederate flags on campus. Following a series of tense student encounters over Confederate and other racist symbols, a conflict resolution team was invited to intervene. Team members created a…