This is a serious breach of academic freedom and the First Amendment. "The law is entitled to every person's evidence." Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS has no power to silence these three UF professors and keep them from testifying in voting rights litigation as experts.
Obstreporous RON DeSANTIS is obstructing justice.
He's too big for his britches and must be defeated for re-election in 2022. What a nasty willful man. Professors Daniel A. Smith<a href="https://polisci.ufl.edu/michael-mcdonald/">, Michael McDonald and Sharon Wright Austin are experts and must be heard by federal court without threats or intimidation by this Dull Republican bully-boy, TRUMP's mini-me. If DeSantis does not cease and desist, Professors Smith, McDonald and Austin will sue him and his malicious maladministration for violation of First Amendmen rights. From The Washington Post and The New York Times:
Florida Bars State Professors From Testifying in Voting Rights Case
After being hired as expert witnesses for groups opposing a restrictive voting law, three University of Florida academics were told they could not participate in the lawsuit against the state.
Three University of Florida professors have been barred from assisting plaintiffs in a lawsuit to overturn the state’s new lawrestricting voting rights, lawyers said in a federal court filing on Friday. The ban is an extraordinary limit on speech that raises questions of academic freedom and First Amendment rights.
University officials told the three that because the school was a state institution, participating in a lawsuit against the state “is adverse to U.F.’s interests” and could not be permitted. In their filing, the lawyers sought to question Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, on whether he was involved in the decision.
Mr. DeSantis has resisted questioning, arguing that all of his communications about the law are protected from disclosure because discussions about legislation are privileged. In their filing on Friday, lawyers for the plaintiffs said the federal questions in the case — including whether the law discriminates against minority groups — override any state protections.
Two university representatives said they could not comment on pending litigation. Mr. DeSantis’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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The university’s refusal to allow the professors to testify was a marked turnabout for the University of Florida. Like schools nationwide, the university has routinely allowed academic experts to offer expert testimony in lawsuits, even when they oppose the interests of the political party in power.
Leading experts on academic freedom said they knew of no similar restrictions on professors’ speech and testimony and said the action was probably unconstitutional.
One of the professors in the latest filing, Daniel A. Smith, testified with the University of Florida’s permission in two voting rights lawsuits against Florida’s Republican-led government in 2018. One suit forced the state to provide Spanish-language ballots for Hispanic voters. The other overturned a state-imposed ban on early-voting polling places on Florida university campuses.
But university officials reversed course after a coalition of advocacy and voting rights groups sued in May to block restrictions on voting enacted this year by the Republican-controlled State Legislature. Among other provisions, the new law sharply limits the use of ballot drop boxes, makes it harder to obtain absentee ballots and places new requirements on voter registration drives.
Among other claims, the plaintiffs argue that the law disproportionately limits the ability of Black and Hispanic voters to cast ballots.
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Lawyers for the plaintiffs sought to hire three University of Florida political scientists as expert witnesses: Dr. Smith, the chair of the university’s political science department; Michael McDonald, a nationally recognized elections scholar; and Sharon Wright Austin, who studies African American political behavior.
In rejecting Dr. Smith’s request, the dean of the university’s college of arts and sciences, David E. Richardson, wrote that “outside activities that may pose a conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida create a conflict for the University of Florida.” A university vice president overseeing conflicts of interest issued the other two rejections.
One lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case, Kira Romero-Craft, said that reasoning “goes against the core of what the University of Florida should stand for in terms of academic freedom.”
“It seems reasonable for us to understand whether the executive office of the governor had any role in participating in that decision,” she said.
An author of two books on academic freedom, Henry Reichman, called the state’s new restrictions “crazy.”
“The whole purpose of a university and academic freedom is to allow scholars free rein to conduct research,” said Mr. Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. “The ultimate logic of this is that you can be an expert in the United States, except in the state where you’re actually working and being paid by the state.”
Robert C. Post, a Yale Law School professor and expert on academic freedom and the First Amendment, said he knew of no other case in which a university had imposed prior restraint on a professor’s ability to speak.
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“The university does not exist to protect the governor,” he said. “It exists to serve the public. It is an independent institution to serve the public good, and nothing could be more to the public good than a professor telling the truth to the public under oath.”
Why the university reversed its position is unclear, but the professors’ demand to question Governor DeSantis appears aimed at discovering whether the school’s administrators acted under pressure.
The state’s new voting restrictions were a priority for Mr. DeSantis, who signed them into law before a crowd of supporters of former President Donald J. Trump in a ceremony broadcast by Fox News. Local reporters were barred from the event.
The governor had earlier described the 2020 election as the most efficient and secure in Florida’s history, but said he was calling for stricter voting rules because “we cannot rest on our laurels.”
Mr. DeSantis has close allies at the University of Florida. The head of the school’s board of trustees, Morteza Hosseini, is a major Republican Party donor and DeSantis adviser who co-chaired a transition team formed after the governor’s victory in 2018.
The two men made headlines this week when The Gainesville Sun reported that Mr. Hosseini, who is known as Mori, had arranged this fall for the University of Florida to hire and grant tenure to a controversial U.C.L.A. professor, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, in only two weeks. Mr. DeSantis quickly named Dr. Ladapo as the state’s surgeon general.
Dr. Ladapo’s views on Covid-19 protections such as vaccinations and masking are in line with Mr. DeSantis’s but sharply at odds with federal guidelines. His first act in the post was to ban Florida schools from quarantining students exposed to Covid-19 as long as they show no symptoms of illness.
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In an Oct. 13 letter to university officials, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Florida branch noted that Mr. DeSantis had signed legislation this year requiring universities to annually assess the state of academic freedom and ensure that students hear a variety of viewpoints, including those they disagree with.
Barring the professors’ testimony goes against those very tenets, the letter stated, adding that the university “simply should not be looking to Governor DeSantis to decide which speech activities it will engage in. That is precisely the opposite of the values that universities are thought to stand for.”
Michael Wines writes about voting and other election-related issues. Since joining The Times in 1988, he has covered the Justice Department, the White House, Congress, Russia, southern Africa, China and various other topics. @miwine
University of Florida bars faculty from testifying in voting rights lawsuit against DeSantis administration
The public university said the three political scientists — Daniel A. Smith, Michael McDonald, and Sharon Wright Austin — could pose “a conflict of interest to the executive branch” and harm the school’s interests if they testified against the law signed by DeSantis in May.
“As UF is a state actor, litigation against the state is adverse to UF’s interests,” school officials said, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
Lawyers attempting to reverse the Florida law, also known as Senate Bill 90, have sought to question DeSantis on whether he was involved in the decision to prevent the academics from testifying, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the university’s move.
The move to bar professors from being expert witnesses in public trials is highly unusual. In a letter to the university, lawyers representing the professors said that faculty retain their First Amendment rights to speech even if their remarks may “make a University’s relationship with funding sources more difficult.”
The attorneys cited U.S. Supreme Court rulings that protect the rights of individuals to disclose information acquired “by virtue of their public employment.”
The academics will file a legal challenge against the university if it does not change its stance, said Paul Donnelly, an attorney representing Smith, McDonald, and Austin.
As Florida’s governor, DeSantis has influence over the funding of public higher-education institutions in the state. He also has the authority to name six of the 13 members on the university’s board of trustees. All appointed trustees are subject to state Senate confirmation.
University officials and representatives for DeSantis could not immediately be reached for comment.
After the 2020 presidential election, DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law that, among other measures, restricts voting by mail and bars everyone except election officials from providing food or water to voters waiting in long lines. In Florida, particularly during early voting in October, casting a ballot can mean standing in line in the hot sun.
This law was enacted despite a “virtually flawless election” in Florida last year. Former president Donald Trump, who has baselessly alleged voting fraud elsewhere, won the state’s 29 electoral votes.
About 40 percent of all votes cast by Blacks in last year’s presidential election were by mail, or double that from 2016, according to Demos, a think tank that is among the groups suing to reverse the new voting restrictions.
Multiple studies show that precincts with larger Black populations tend to endure longer lines on Election Day. Restricting mail voting will mean longer voting lines at more crowded polling stations, Demos said.
