University of Florida Reverses Course to Allow Professors to Testify Against State : politics

Acceding to a storm of protest, the University of Florida abandoned efforts on Friday to keep three political science professors from testifying in a voting-rights lawsuit against the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Hours later, however, the professors sued university officials in federal court, claiming their First Amendment rights had been violated. They asked the court to permanently bar the university from limiting their outside work on matters opposing the state’s interests.

“The lawsuit on behalf of three political science professors fires back at the brazen violation by the University of Florida of their First Amendment rights and academic freedom,” David A. O’Neil and Paul Donnelly, two lawyers for the professors, said in a statement on Friday. “It is time for this matter to be rightfully adjudicated, not by press release, but in a court of law.”

The lawsuit appeared likely to prolong a weeklong dispute between the professors and university officials that has gained national attention for its political and free-speech implications. A spokeswoman for the university, Hessy Fernandez, said officials do not comment on pending litigation.

The professors, Sharon D. Wright Austin, Daniel A. Smith and Michael McDonald, are providing expert testimony in a case that seeks to overturn restrictions on voting approved by the State Legislature last spring. The legislation was a top priority for Mr. DeSantis, a Republican who has sought to build a national political following.

Mr. DeSantis signed the legislation during a nationally broadcast appearance in May on “Fox and Friends.”

Critics have charged — and the governor and the university have denied — that the university has sought to silence professors at the administration’s behest. The professors were told last month that they could not assist plaintiffs in the voting-rights lawsuit because opposing state interests could “create a conflict for the University of Florida.”

The university’s reversal of that stance on Friday came less than a day after Mr. DeSantis’s office had lined up behind the policy, saying in a statement that the professors’ First Amendment right to speak freely was not relevant because they were being paid to act as expert witnesses in the case.

While Mr. DeSantis has denied any role in the university’s decisions, he has made no secret of his view that the state’s university faculty operates as an arm of a liberal establishment opposed to his political positions. Editors’ Picks The Price of Living in ‘Paradise’ Is Higher Than Ever Hunter Biden: Emotionally Honest, Generically Smooth Is It Just Us or Does Everyone Have a Cold Right Now? Continue reading the main story

“Those three professors are free to testify in the lawsuit against the state, but pursuant to the institution’s policy on conflicts of interest, they cannot receive financial compensation for their testimony against the state,” a spokeswoman for the governor, Christina Pushaw, said on Thursday, before the university changed its position. “The Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, but there is no right to profit from speech.”

The lawsuit filed by the professors on Friday took issue with that, stating that other professors had been barred from joining lawsuits against the state even though they were not being paid.

They also noted that Florida International University, which also limits outside activities that conflict with the state, had allowed a professor to act as an expert witness for the Republican National Committee in the same voting-rights lawsuit from which they had been barred.

The university’s president, Kent Fuchs, lifted the prohibition on the professors’ testimony in an email distributed campuswide on Friday. He stated that he had asked officials “to reverse the decisions on recent requests by UF employees to serve as expert witnesses in litigation in which the state of Florida is a party and to approve the requests regardless of personal compensation, assuming the activity is on their own time without using university resources.”

Mr. Fuchs also appointed a task force of seven university officials, including the provost, deans of the journalism and law schools, and the university’s chief ethics and privacy officer, to review conflict-of-interest policies and determine how requests to testify would be handled in the future.

The concession appeared to be an unqualified victory for the three professors, all nationally known experts in their fields. Drs. Smith and McDonald have frequently testified in election and voting-rights cases nationwide. Dr. Austin is an expert on African American political behavior and the author of a number of books on that and related topics.

All three had given depositions and submitted expert reports in the Florida lawsuit despite the university’s effort to block them. They are scheduled to testify in the case in January.

The university’s critics were quick to proclaim victory. Aaron Terr, the program officer of the academic-freedom advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, called the original denial indefensible, adding: “UF must remember that the private speech of its public faculty does not lose constitutional protection simply because it may undermine the government’s case.”

Kenneth R. Mayer, a University of Wisconsin political science professor who organized a protest against the denial by more than 80 academics nationally, said the university’s reputation has been “rightly hammered in the past week” by its actions, and that it was up to Mr. Fuchs, the president, to repair it.

Among other changes, the elections law being challenged by the three professors, known as Senate Bill 90, sharply limits the use of ballot drop boxes, places restrictions on voter registration drives and makes requesting an absentee ballot more onerous. Mr. DeSantis has touted it as an election integrity measure, but plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue that it aims to depress turnout by groups that generally do not vote Republican, especially African Americans.

After the university rejection of the professors’ request to testify became public last Friday, a fourth University of Florida professor said he had been barred last year from submitting a statement in suits challenging another DeSantis priority, a statewide ban on masks in schools. That professor, Jeffrey L. Goldhagen, said on Friday that the university had lifted its ban on his participation in the suits.

Four professors at the university’s law school also said this week that they had been told that they could not sign a brief in another lawsuit — this one opposing a state law raising barriers to restoring voting rights to former felons — if they included their affiliation with the university. The four were the only ones among scores of professors signing the brief whose affiliations were not identified.