Top officials at the University of South Florida were impressed with Sam Rechek, a 21-year-old senior who spoke to the school’s board of trustees Tuesday about his passion for free speech.
He had started a civil discourse club and said he wanted to be known as “the free speech guy on campus.” He became due process rights counsel for students accused of conduct violations.
University president Rhea Law told Recek that she was proud of him, that he would become an excellent lawyer. Board chairman Will Weatherford, paraphrasing a Bible verse, praised his commitment to free speech at times.
By Tuesday evening, Rechek was taking his university to court in the latest legal challenge to Florida’s new Stop WOKE law.
The lawsuit names USF’s board of trustees, the state Board of Governors that oversees the university system and other state officials, asking them to stop enforcing the law. Rechek is joined by USF history professor Adriana Novoa and together they are represented by the civil liberties group the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Also known as HB7, the law includes language that prohibits workplace training or school instruction that causes anyone to feel “guilt, anxiety or other psychological distress” related to race, color, national origin or sex because of the actions “committed in the past”.
Rechek said that prevents members of his club and students in his classes from having honest conversations about race. He said he did not think the university was aware of his intention to file a lawsuit at the time of his presentation, but believed anyone with the university’s interests at heart should understand his opposition.
“The central principles of the University of South Florida are truth and wisdom,” he said. “For me there is no greater way to pursue these two high values than through civil discourse and robust debate about difficult topics.”
Other lawsuits have been filed against the law, and a federal judge has blocked a provision of the act related to workplace training on race. But Rechek, Novoa and the foundation contend that the First and Fourteenth Amendments should prevent it from being applied to college campuses.
Novoa, a USF faculty member since 2001, teaches courses titled “Science in Cultural Context,” “Sports History from National to Global Contexts,” and “Modern Latin America,” among others.
After reviewing the law and her course materials, she concluded that she should remove readings on Jackie Robinson and segregation in baseball from her sports history course “because the materials ‘advance’ arguments about white privilege.”
The same was true of another course dealing with the tensions resulting from colonialism that led to revolutions in Latin America and the treatment and extermination of indigenous peoples in Argentina. These themes “advance arguments about ‘collective culpability,'” the suit says.
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Novoa, who grew up in Argentina, said in a news release that the new law prevents her from learning to the best of her ability.
“Government should not tell people what they can talk about and think,” she said in the release. “I know indoctrination. I have seen indoctrination. And the indoctrination isn’t coming from my classroom—it’s coming from a law that aims to limit the freedom to think and express those thoughts, which is the foundation of good education.”
USF spokeswoman Althea Johnson said the university does not comment on pending litigation.
