In You Can’t Teach That!, Keith Whittington endorses the view that what is taught in the university classroom should be decided by the teacher, subject to the scholarly consensus and faculty discipline of that teacher’s professional peers. Whittington is the author of many books, including Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018); the founding chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance; and after more than 25 years teaching at Princeton, now the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School. “I take for granted,” he writes, “the proposition that traditional notions of academic freedom are worth defending in the current moment.”

His eloquent but flawed book is especially concerned with Republican state legislators who have sought to halt what they regard as indoctrination contrary to America’s commitment to racial equality. One of Whittington’s particular targets, Florida’s 2022 “Stop WOKE” Act (whose enforcement is currently enjoined by order of a federal district judge), prohibits as unlawful discrimination “any other required activity that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels [an] individual to believe” any of eight specified racist dogmas, including that “[a]n individual’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color,