A federal court has now upheld the constitutionality of the law…

…restricting students, faculty members, and researchers at the state’s public colleges and universities from traveling to Cuba and four other countries that the U.S. government considers terrorist states….

Faculty members had asked the judge to lift the travel restrictions, arguing that the law violated their First Amendment rights and impinged on the federal government’s ability to regulate foreign commerce….

The law prevents students, professors, and researchers at public universities and community colleges in Florida from using state or federal funds, or private foundation grants administered by their institutions, to travel to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Those at private colleges in Florida are forbidden to use state funds for that purpose.

Putting aside the fact that if the Florida legislature really wanted to prevent travel to states that support terrorism, they would have had to bar all domestic travel with state funds by its professors (or at least travel to Miami, one of the major launching pads for terrorism in the Northern hemisphere–for example), this law clearly impinges the academic freedom of all those historians, sociologists, economists, archaeologists, etc. who might have sound scholarly reasons to need to visit these countries.  (That it violates the ideal of academic freedom does not, alas, mean it violates the First Amendment, especially given the increasingly cramped interpretation the courts have given to academic freedom as a constitutional right.)  It is also a pointless embarrassment for the state universities in Florida.