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 with which it disagrees. Thus, according to Defendants, the content of university curriculum may include the State’s preferred viewpoint on the subject matter of prescribed courses and certainly excludes (at the State’s discretion) any viewpoint the State chooses to prohibit. Defendants ground this argument in the notion that anything professors utter in a state university classroom during “in-class instruction” is government speech, and thus, the government can both determine the content of that speech and prohibit the expression of certain viewpoints. See, e.g., ECF No. 52 at 19, in Case No.: 4:22cv324-MW/MAF (“The in-class instruction offered by state-employed educators is also pure government speech, not the speech of the educators themselves.”).

Defendants reach this conclusion by cherry-picking language, devoid of context, from two cases in particular—namely, Rosenberger and Garcetti. In Rosenberger, the Supreme Court held that the University of Virginia’s denial of funding for a student group amounted to impermissible viewpoint discrimination because the denial was based not on the general religious subject matter of the student group’s publication, but on the “prohibited perspective” concerning the “general subject matter.” Rosenberger, 515 U.S. at 832. In so holding, the Supreme Court rejected the University’s reliance on the Court’s “assurance” in Widmar that universities have the right “to make academic judgments as to how best to allocate scarce resources.” Id. at 833. Highlighting the fact that Rosenberger involved