Page:Novoa v. Diaz.pdf/8

 Florida Statutes,” and did not take “appropriate corrective action, the university will be ineligible for performance funding for the next fiscal year following the year in which the Board of Governors made the determination.” Id. at 4–5.

Plaintiffs include university professors and college students who challenge the IFA’s amendments to the FEEA and the Board of Governors’sGovernors’ [sic] implementing regulation as they relate to prohibiting expression of certain viewpoints regarding the eight specified concepts during class instruction. Plaintiffs assert these provisions are unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. They ask this Court to enjoin enforcement of the challenged provisions, citing the Supreme Court’s long history of shielding academic freedom from government encroachment and the First Amendment’s intolerance toward government attempts to “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” See ''Keyishian v. Bd. of Regs. of Univ. of State of N.Y.'', 385 U.S. 589, 683 (1967).

Defendants respond that the First Amendment offers no protection here. They argue that because university professors are public employees, they are simply the State’s mouthpieces in university classrooms. As a result, Defendants claim, the State has unfettered authority to limit what professors may say in class, even at the university level. Alternatively, Defendants suggest that even if this Court is required to balance the State’s interests against the professors’ First Amendment rights, the