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 At the hearing on Plaintiffs’ motions, both sides recognized this authority of the State to prescribe the content of its universities’ curriculum. Indeed, this makes intuitive sense. Of course the State has a say in which courses are taught at its public universities. Cf. Epperson, 393 U.S. at 116 (Stewart, J., concurring in result) (“A State is entirely free, for example, to decide that the only foreign language to be taught in its public school system shall be Spanish. But would a State be constitutionally free to punish a teacher for letting his students know what other languages are also spoken in the world? I think not.”); id. at 111 (Black, J., concurring in result) (“It is plain that a state law prohibiting all teaching of human development or biology is constitutionally quite different from a law that compels a teacher to teach as true only one theory of a given doctrine. It would be difficult to make a First Amendment case out of a state law eliminating the subject of higher mathematics, or astronomy, or biology from its curriculum.”).

But Defendants take it a step further, arguing that the State—though constitutionally barred from compelling professors to express the State’s chosen belief—has an unfettered right to prohibit professors from expressing viewpoints