Three more plaintiffs were added this week to a federal lawsuit challenging the University of Florida’s conflict-of-interest policy as an affront to professors’ academic freedom and freedom of speech.
UF medical professor Jeffrey Goldhagen and law professors Teresa Reid and Kenneth Nunn joined the lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Florida. Originally, three political science professors sued the university and President W. Kent Fuchs after their requests to provide expert testimony for groups opposed to Florida’s new voting rights bill were initially denied.
The scope of the litigation was expanded to cover professors’ participation in legal challenges to coronavirus-related public health policies.
“Plaintiffs are six full-time professors at the university who were asked and sought the university’s permission to participate in litigation challenging laws on voting rights and COVID-19 public health measures,” the amended complaint states. “The university denied plaintiffs’ requests for one reason: Plaintiffs wanted to use their experience and expertise to support Florida citizens who challenged the state of Florida, rather than backing the state’s position.”
The university eventually reversed course and allowed the three original plaintiffs to testify as expert witnesses. Fuchs appointed a task force to review the policy governing professors’ outside interests and potential conflicts of interest, but the professors contend their academic freedom is threatened as long as the current policy remains in place.
“Given the University of Florida’s pervasive and deferential adherence to the state government's political whims, it is unsurprising that three more professors have joined this lawsuit,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys, David O’Neil and Paul Donnelly, said in a statement emailed to the Florida Record. “When the university hired the plaintiffs, they swore an oath to serve the people of Florida – not its government.”
The legal fight will continue until the conflict-of-interest policy is repealed, according to the attorneys.
The three original plaintiffs also expressed disappointment about the university task force currently reviewing the conflict-of interest policy. In a Nov. 12 letter to Fuchs, the professors said the task force failed to include faculty from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, that some task force members will be unable to judge the issues objectively because they have been previously engaged in the development of such policies, and that the scope of the panel seems to be limited to expert witness testimony rather than the larger issue of academic freedom.
“We are deeply disappointed that the university’s task force is simply a bureaucratic maneuver to squelch criticism and avoid the true issue: concerted and repeated denials of First Amendment rights and academic freedom,” O’Neil and Donnelly said. “By limiting the task force’s scope to solely reviewing its expert witness policy and by appointing individuals who themselves enforced this unconstitutional policy, the university has laid bare not only its clear conflicts of interest in convening the task force, but also its inability to take this critical work seriously.”