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Nevilledog

(51,157 posts) Sun Jan 23, 2022, 08:48 PM Jan 2022

Judge Issues Stinging Free Speech Ruling Against University of Florida

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/us/florida-professors-free-speech.html

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https://archive.fo/C4gbD

WASHINGTON — A federal judge handed a crucial free-speech victory to six University of Florida professors Friday, ordering the university to stop enforcing a policy that had barred them from giving expert testimony in lawsuits against the state.

The stinging ruling, by Judge Mark E. Walker of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, accused the university of trying to silence the professors for fear that their testimony would anger state officials and legislators who control the school’s funding. Judge Walker likened that to the decision last month by Hong Kong University to remove a 25-foot sculpture marking the 1989 massacre of student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by the Chinese military, apparently for fear of riling the authoritarian Chinese government.

If the comparison distressed university officials, he wrote, “the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.”

A university spokeswoman, Hessy Fernandez, said school officials would review the order before deciding whether to appeal it.

Technically, the 74-page order limits the university only temporarily, until there is a ruling in the professors’ lawsuit challenging the policy. But the judge, who was appointed in 2012 by President Barack Obama, left scant doubt that his opinion of the school’s conduct was unlikely to change, stating that the evidence on the “defendants’ side of the scale sits empty; plaintiffs’ overflows.”

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