Texas A&M Bans Plato (further updates)
Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide.
That’s a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, was told by university officials today about his upcoming “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, due to start next week.
Here’s the actual email:
“Rule 08.01” refers to these recent policy changes at the university. “Kristi” is Department of Philosophy chair Kristi Sweet, who, I think it’s safe to assume, was merely passing along the verdict of “the college leadership team“, headed up by interim dean Simon North.
(The above email and other documents in this post were provided by Professor Peterson.)
I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato.
The Plato readings were from the Symposium, particularly passages on Aristophanes’ myth of split humans and Diotima’s ladder of love. The other readings are from Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues (10th edition) by Andrew Fiala and Barbara MacKinnon.
Professor Peterson had been contacted by his chair on December 19th about the review of syllabi for Contemporary Moral Problems courses. Here’s that email:
Professor Peterson replied to this, submitting his syllabus for what he referred to, correctly, as “mandatory censorship review”.
Among other things, he said, “Please note that my course does not “advocate” any ideology; I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.” (See “The Charade of Banning ‘Advocacy’“.) He also reminded his chair and college officials that “the U.S. Constitution protects my course content,” as do the norms of academic freedom.
Here is his full reply:
Here is Professor Peterson’s syllabus (also here):
It was clear that Texas A&M’s new policies were going to lead to conflicts with the First Amendment and academic freedom. That the first such conflict involves telling a professor to remove from his syllabus the writings of the person who created what was arguably the west’s first institution of higher education is too perfect an irony, though. This reality is unbelievable.
(Thanks to several readers who alerted me to the story.)
Related: A Mess at Texas A&M
UPDATE 1 (1/7/26): Both the Texas A&M Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have issued statements about Texas A&M’s decision regarding Dr. Peterson’s syllabus.
The Texas A&M AAUP says:
The AAUP–Texas A&M-College Station Chapter condemns Texas A&M University’s reported decision to censor the teaching of Plato by restricting a professor from covering foundational philosophical texts within his expertise in an undergraduate core course because it addresses race and gender theories. At a public university, this action raises serious legal concerns, including viewpoint discrimination and violations of constitutionally protected academic freedom.
Beyond the legal implications, the moral stakes are profound. Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world’s most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education and denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought. A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust—and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning. We are deeply saddened to witness the decline of one of Texas’s great universities.
FIRE’s Lindsie Rank says:
Texas A&M now believes Plato doesn’t belong in an introductory philosophy course. The philosophy department is demanding that professor Martin Peterson remove Platonic readings because they “may” touch on race or gender ideology. He’s been given until the end of the day to comply or be reassigned. This is what happens when the board of regents gives university bureaucrats veto power over academic content. The board didn’t just invite censorship, they unleashed it with immediate and predictable consequences. You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.
UPDATE 2 (1/7/26): The New York Times reports:
Dr. Sweet said on Wednesday that she had no comment on the exchanges with Dr. Peterson. In an interview, Dr. Peterson said he would reluctantly alter the course and replace the disputed modules with “lectures on free speech and academic freedom.” But he was angry, he said, as well as bothered by the sense that students would receive a less rigorous, challenging education in his classroom. He insisted that he wasn’t “trying deliberately to be provocative” when he included the Plato texts.
UPDATE 3 (1/8/26): Dr. Peterson shared some more emails. The first, sent yesterday, is his reply to the email from Dr. Sweet reproduced at the top of this post, cc’ing members of the college leadership, in which he states that after consulting with his lawyer, he will revise the course:
Dr. Sweet replied, “Thank you, Dr. Peterson. I will look forward to receiving your revised syllabus, as part of the syllabus certification process.”
Today, Dr. Peterson responded by stating that he would be replacing the censored readings with the article about the university’s censorship published yesterday afternoon at The New York Times:
UPDATE 4 (1/8/26): “Legalize Plato” — the t-shirt.
UPDATE 5 (1/9/26): The Pink News puts it this way:
UPDATE 6 (1/11/26): Professor Peterson has written an op-ed at MSNOW. An excerpt:
If one accepts the university rule, adopted in November, that bans the teaching of “race and gender ideology,” Plato joins a long list of prominent thinkers whose ideas might be deemed corrupting to youth and therefore subject to censorship…. The real problem is the absurd policy imposed by the Board of Regents. There is no state law that requires us to censor Plato. The policy could be dropped tomorrow if they chose to do so—and I very much hope they will.
UPDATE 7 (1/14/26): Texas A&M President Tommy Williams responds to critics.
UPDATE 8 (1/14/26): “What is college without students tangling with the thorny moral and ethical subjects roiling politics and culture?” asks an editorial at The Washington Post. And at The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch writes about how it is “ironically fitting” that Plato was the target here, and suggests that “now that both democracy and education are under threat in the United States, philosophers may have to relearn the ‘prudence’ that once seemed like a relic of history.”
So ****ing vote in 2026 to restore something like sanity.
Yes indeed, but we need to be doing a lot more than that. The forces that brought this about are still in place. Somehow we need to change the way the public sees us, so that they won’t stand for this sort of thing. I won’t pretend that I have an easy solution.
Do you mean like the 77,000,000 Americans who voted Trump into office the last time around? Millions upon millions of American voters love this sort of thing. Votes are meaningless if you simply get outvoted. The persistent tendency to think voting is the solution is utterly bizarre.
It’s bizarre in another sense, too: Who are you supposed to vote for to ensure this doesn’t happen when the prevailing tendency in the alternative party is to placate, appease, and gain bipartisanship points as they appeal to a made-up middle constructed for them by people who want them to lose? Votes aren’t just meaningless if you’re simply outvoted; they can be meaningless if the party you vote for decides to sacrifice its promises to you on the premise that it’d simply be too radical or unpopular or even inconvenient, and that it’s much easier to pretend it’s all an episode of The West Wing, perform respectability, and scold voters for demanding too much.
If you are arguing that Democrats would also attempt to ban Plato in universities, your understanding of the US political situation is so far removed from anything resembling reality that you should not be commenting on current affairs.
No. They would ban someone else.
The comment you’re responding to is referring to a claim that Democrats appeal to an imaginary centrist ideology.
Assuming from context that you agree with Felix’s comment, would you care to speculate on what ideologies or authors a centrist government would ban?
Like whom?
I’m sorry but this is false equivalence fallacy…
or to stay on topic this is an example of Aristotle’s Fallacy of Accident by confusing similarity with identity or equal standing, overlooking deeper distinctions that invalidate the comparison.
Dems always push the status quo. We have a new status quo. That’s what he’s saying. No common democrat will fix any of this.
Chris nicely elaborates on what I mean: “Dems always push the status quo. We have a new status quo. That’s what he’s saying. No common democrat will fix any of this.”
When Democrats inherit the apparatuses created by their opponents (or sometimes jointly created), they don’t dismantle them; they manage them. That’s why so much of the nonsense created in the Bush era endured, to this very day.
I don’t believe that Democrats “would also attempt to ban Plato in universities.” I believe that, if these types of bans go unchallenged and become entrenched, become the status quo, Democrats will do nothing to undo them. They will still expect you to vote for them, to avoid further escalation from the right. But that does not mean you should necessarily expect that they will undo what the right has already set in place.
This is not a good situation, as it means we are left with the terrible systems Republicans (and some Democrats) have constructed, with your vote doing little to nothing to dismantle those systems. And here, presumably, the purpose of your vote isn’t merely to empower Democrats to “manage” those systems, but to unmake them. If the best they can offer you is management, then your vote does not change the situation; it just gives you a slightly less odious manager, one who is nominally attuned to your concerns, but who will ultimately stick with precedent, the status quo, and, above all else, compromise and bipartisanship.
It will take decades to undo the harm that Trump has done to our government and our constitution.
To speak to your point, I am curious to see what happens when the political pendulum swings to favor the Democrats in Washington (which it will because the one constant is the political pendulum always swings). Will progams and agencies that were cut be reestablished? Example – will PBS be refunded? I am not so sure the Democrats are going to jump at the chance at putting all the derailed cars back on the funding track. They might complain and bemoan their loss, but I have a feeling when the day comes that they are able to “right some wrongs”, the votes just won’t be there.
The biggest issue I see now is the sheer volume of destruction and the utter lack, at least publicly, of a Democratic plan for rebuilding (or anything else).
It would be nice to get a Dem POTUS and filibuster-proof majority in 2028 and just pass legislation saying, in effect, “everything goes back to the way it was in 2024,” but a) the latter is incredibly unlikely, b) I doubt Democrats have the wherewithal to do it anyway, and c) it would reverse the wanton destruction but do nothing to improve upon the still-shitty status quo ante.
Correct on all counts, I believe, and very well said 👏🏻
FWIW, I think that a lot of Trump voters voted for Trump not because they “love this sort of thing”, though depressingly many no doubt did. My understanding is that, in the previous US presidential election, as in many elections around the world, many voted on the basis of a small number of factors that matter most to them, often clustering around economic issues. Some Trump voters were probably not even aware of the more awful things that Trump had said, done, or said he would do. (An obviously imperfect but nonetheless striking indicator of voter ignorance was the spike in Google searches for “Did Biden drop out?” come election day.)
I think that if people were more aware of “this sort of thing”, some may vote differently. Spreading stories like the above – and, even better, explaining why such stories are chilling and absurd – could therefore have some positive impact.
I also think that if Trump is perceived to do badly on things that many voters do keep track of, it could show in the midterms. Republicans have been anxious about these upcoming elections for exactly this reason. Voting is more likely to be impactful under these circumstances.
Of those that voted for him only a fraction are true maga. The rest did it out of political muscle memory. Maga does not represent 50% of the US.
It doesn’t, but it doesn’t much matter when every American institution—from news orgs to universities to law firms and ever the ostensible “opposition” party—acts as if MAGA is the be-all, end-all of the American experiment.
Voting is crucial. But I think it’s worthwhile to note that a constitutional democracy protects certain rights from even majority rule. This is one where I could believe that the majority in today’s Texas/US may be ok with stopping this type of teaching. But the constitution (and ethical actors) should protect them from being squashed.
Unfortunately, the “sanity” that prevailed before Trump’s re-election involved professors being persecuted for things like showing an art history class a centuries-old Persian painting of the prophet Muhammad, or for stating the orthodox view in biology that there are two sexes.
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2022/10/03/portland/usm-wont-replace-professor-2-sexes/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html
The reality we face is that both the progressive left and the republican party are disgusting fascist abusers who hate academic freedom. The democratic party still retains some vestiges of its old liberalism, even now, but it’s increasingly beholden to the activist left, which is little more at this point than a misandrist and anti-semitic hate movement.
To paraphrase the Princess Bride, I don’t think that word, “Facism”, means what you think it does.
Sure, the Activist Left could be accused of vocal outrage and pearl-clutching about biased conservative speech but that’s entirely different from the current environment of institutional censure, threats and wholesale top-down financial extortion from the political establishment. The scale & severity of state-sponsored mind-control isn’t even close.
Besides, the two examples you’ve given are absurd:
1) The view of sex as purely, exactly and always binary has been completely disproved scientifically decades ago. That doesn’t mean we, the Left, can’t do a better job of acknowledging that a male/female dichotomy is a good rough approximation of reality, but only that. To do otherwise would be the same as saying physics ended at Newtonian physics and deny Einstein found that Nature is stranger than the orthodox imagination. Ideology doesn’t change observable, provable reality.
2) A university banning a picture of Mohammad might make sense _both_ from a cultural sensitivity perspective and as a practical safety issue. It’s not wokeness run amok. Why would anyone be threatened by that or think it represents some slippery slope? Sometimes institutions have to choose the harm of free speech versus the benefit, not because speech isn’t “free” but because they acknowledge it has consequences.
The claim that the Democratic Party is “increasingly beholden to the activist left” is simply unbelievable. If this were true, under the previous Democratic administration, official government support for Israel would have ceased—the US would have acknowledged the threat of genocide and cut off support to the State. Instead, the party continued to provide such support, materially and in its commentary, and made the boneheaded move of sending Bill Clinton of all people to scold prospective voters who deviated from the party line. This is a party whose core and establishment would rather lose elections appealing to a mythical middle and moderate Republicans than acknowledge the “activist left,” much less embrace its demands.
On the other side, however, ESands can’t claim that the Republican Party is “increasingly beholden to the far right,” because the “increasingly” part is already in the past: The Republican Party has been radicalized into MAGA and the embrace of far right ideology. This isn’t just a few “activists” and pundits at CPAC; this is now the core and establishment of the party. And, now, in power, and using the power of the state to attack higher education, there are people still whining about supposed “wokeness” (or “political correctness”) run amok?
Strange — you begin your comment by denying that progressive are fascists, then conclude your comment by demonstrating, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that progressive fascists do exist and that you indeed are one.
College professors should never be fired for failing to abide by the religious strictures observed by some sects of Muslims. Suggesting that they should is as psychotic and as hostile to academic freedom as anything the republicans have ever proposed.
Wow.. a lot in here Straw man, Ad Hominem, evasion…
Felix did not state he supported firing professors for blasphemy or cultural insensitivity. The inference that because he minimized “wokeness” complaints (calling them “supposed” or “whining”),he must support every controversial administrative action taken in the name of inclusivity. Then the name calling and emotional escalation.
Quite a deflection…
“…as hostile to academic freedom as anything the republicans have ever proposed”?!
For just one example: I’d say that an actual ban on any topic *related* to sexual orientation or gender identity without prior, written approval from administrators is very hostile to academic freedom, given the range of prohibited topics. I’d estimate that the number of topics are related to sexual identity or gender identity is very, very, very large.
I try to stay out of Heavenly matters, but there is most definitely no orthodox view in biology, per the current year of the Lord, that there are two sexes. Just for the record, as I suspect this is bait.
It’s deeply depressing that I can always count on deeply and proudly ignorant comments like this in any free speech discussion on DN (or perhaps dishonest it’s hard to know what’s charitable when anonymous people uncritically regurgitate Republican talking points). At any rate these are two cases. In one the professor kept their job in the other an adjunct was let go. Now the latter was a travesty but it is in fact the only case in the last twenty years I know of where an academic lost a job for violating any sort of left wing orthodoxy in the US. (Feel free to cite more if they exist and you feel like doing actual research. I’m sure you won’t find more than you can count on one hand.) On the other hand according to Inside Higher Ed over 50 professors were fired for comments about Charlie Kirk alone. And I dare you to find a single case where a professor was ordered on pain of sanctions to remove a canonical philosopher from a syllabus for ideological reasons by anyone on the left. I mean I taught Heidegger for years and no one ever even complained!
I really struggle to understand how the Rufo/Haidt/Weiss grift has such legs with academics since it’s built entirely on distortion and outright lies. But please don’t do these clowns’ work for them spreading this moral panic about “wokeness” threatening free speech. It may be a good way of playing a smart person on the internet but it’s embarrassing at best coming from academics and harmful at worst.
If you’re unfamiliar with the scores of other cases where professors have been fired for challenging woke dogmas, that means you’re trapped in a progressive echo chamber that’s completely lost touch with reality. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression keeps a database, going back decades, of all of the professors in the US who’ve been fired or censured for political speech. From about 2012 to about 2022, during the era of peak wokeness, it was the left and not the right who were the primary enemies of academic freedom in the US. Here are a few more examples taken more or less at random, you’ll have to look up the rest yourself:
https://www.thefire.org/news/one-georgetown-law-professor-fired-one-resigns-after-conversation-about-black-students
https://www.cato.org/blog/note-unjust-firing-dr-tabia-lee
https://www.thefire.org/news/did-bostons-simmons-university-concoct-scheme-oust-controversial-professor-it-sure-looks-way
https://campus-speech.law.duke.edu/campus-speech-incidents/borowski-v-kean-university/
More or less at random?
Your last example says that the case was dismissed or “effectively ended”?
Of course you can find plenty of “examples” of people coming under fire for “challenging woke dogmas” in a “more or less at random” fashion. Because the assertion of something as a “woke dogma” is itself sufficiently nebulous that it covers both the cases you’ve cited “more or less at random” and instructors applying marking rubrics to work that effectively just says “because the Bible says so,” or, whatever racist or sexist thing one might happen to want to say. It’s all “woke dogmas,” “political correctness,” “Cultural Marxism,” etc., and never just that your ideas are bad and people are telling you that they are bad.
You claimed, in your previous comment, that:
“Now the latter was a travesty but it is in fact the only case in the last twenty years I know of where an academic lost a job for violating any sort of left wing orthodoxy in the US. (Feel free to cite more if they exist and you feel like doing actual research. I’m sure you won’t find more than you can count on one hand.)”
I’ve already given you four more cases of professors being fired for anti-woke political speech, and there are countless others out there. If you’re willing to read through FIRE’s database, you can find them for yourself:
thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire
Everything else you have to say is worthless rationalizations. Stop being an apologist for fascism.
That was not my comment. You are literally quoting someone else.
I mean, talk radio is spewing out toxic sludge for the mind 24/7, voting won’t make a shred of difference. Go online, there’s Youtube videos with ba-zillion “likes” basically pumping the proles full of this bs, our measly “philosophy” classes are a toothpick in the feeble dike that is cracking as we speak. There’s no “restoring sanity” as if there ever was sanity, kiddo.
If we are allowed to…
What an absolute joke of a university.
I recognize there are a lot of pressures on a chair that I never have and never will experience. I also do nevertheless think it is possible to both pass along a message from higher administrators professionally while also indicating to some degree one’s own attitude toward that message. A university is not a military institution.
Yeah, I don’t give the Chair a free pass here. It’s shocking that a philosopher–in fact, the “co-founder and Executive Co-Director of the History of Philosophy Society”, no less–would passively acquiesce to the banning of teaching Plato in a philosophy classroom.
We don’t know that she was passive. She has to weigh the moral cost of complicity against the value of representing her colleagues as effectively as possible. If she were to resign in protest, presumably the people closer to the central administration would appoint her replacement.
Also, they didn’t “ban Plato.” They banned this guy, and presumably others, from teaching Plato as he thought best. Still bad, obviously.
“She has to weigh the moral cost of complicity against the value of representing her colleagues as effectively as possible.”
Exactly WHAT moral value is there in being complicit for not only censoring the birthfather of Western philosophy but censoring awareness of socio-political inequalities? Resignation is not the only alternative here.
Hell, I think even Plato was taught in Nazi Germany.
You don’t know what she did or didn’t do, do you? I sure don’t. I just think you should direct your righteous anger at the people who deserve it, namely the voters of Texas and their elected representatives.
Well considering Update # that Justin posted, in which NYTimes says she didn’t want to comment, I think we’re closer to figuring out what she thinks. The plot looks flat. If it was in the spirit of Peterson suing, why would he cave in and alter his course?
Voters don’t know better. We SHOULD blame people who are complicit in upholding fascist institutional activities.
In the spirit of pointing out things we don’t know, it seems to me that we do not know anything about how Peterson intends/intended to teach Plato except for the sake of “teach[ing] students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.” Is your position that a ban on teaching Plato for such a purpose, without advocating for or against the views expressed in the text, is appropriate? Or do you have some private information about how Peterson intended to teach the material which conflicts with the paltry evidence available to the public?
I said “Still bad, obviously.” So no, not appropriate. And no, I have no information other than what appears in the article.
So why the confidence that this isn’t a ban on teaching the relevant material from Plato at all but rather a ban on teaching the material in a certain way? That “way” seems, to me, to be “including the content at all”, but you seem confident that things are otherwise. On what basis?
Because, if the email from Dec. 19th is accurate, the policy for core curriculum courses, of which this course is one, is different from and more restrictive than that for non-core courses. Both policies are, in my opinion, awful, but the difference in fact leaves open that you could teach this exact material, in this exact way, in a different non-core course. Perhaps, de fact, that would not work, but de jure, as it has been described above, it could.
So it *is* a ban on teaching the material at all, not a ban on teaching it one way rather some other way.
If you mean “teach the relevant material from Plato at all *in this course*”, yes. That is not how your original comment read to me and, presumably, others.
Again, I think both policies are awful, for what it is worth.
Of course chairs must pick their battles. This seems to me one worth picking. Moreover, that can be done without needing to hold that the policy should simply not be enforced. The policy is horribly written (shocker!), but as Peterson points out, assigning this material does not constitute “advocating” any particular ideology. Still less is it clear that Plato’s work even contains so-called “gender ideology”.
As for what was banned, he was told to remove the Plato reading, not just to teach it in a different way.
Here’s a radical interpretation: Insofar as we interpret a lot of work as being “footnotes to Plato,” this is a deeper attack on higher education as a whole. Whether there’s anything one would call “gender ideology” in Plato or not, the fact of the matter is that teaching Plato is, evidently in the eyes of some, sufficient to initiate or facilitate strands of thought that lead to it, and therefore, Plato too must be banned. This really isn’t about Plato as such; it’s an attack on open-ended inquiry, on the sort of work that much of higher education is built out of. It reflects a totally different vision of what higher education is supposed to be for, and sadly we’ve been moving in this direction for some time. (Note: I am not personalizing this to anyone involved in this specific case; more commenting on a general trend that I believe this is part of.)
I have no information to provide here, but it seems just as likely that (a) the chair is battling behind the scenes and thoughtfully on behalf of the instructor, (b) everyone involved is quite aware that there will be lawsuits and speaking publicly or writing about this could land them in legal trouble, and (c) the chair could very well have been the one who pushed the committee to ban Plato’s Symposium (knowing both the content of that reading and how politically absurd it looks for a university to ban teaching Plato in a philosophy course).
If that was her intention, that would be a remarkable act of self-sacrifice given the flak she is taking for this, not least in Peterson’s own response to her in Update #3.
Behind closed doors, I am sure she was opposed to this policy. I am sure she has had to work hard to keep the philosophy department afloat amidst some troubling political circumstances. And I don’t doubt that even under these circumstances, a philosophy department can still do some really interesting work some of the time. On the other hand, this amounts to enforcing a principle that makes one’s very field, the history of philosophy, pretty much irrelevant. If we can only study the parts of the cannon that fit certain political rubrics, then what is really left?
Spineless!!! She should’ve thrown a hardcover copy of the Symposium at their faces… screaming, “READ THE DAMN THING!”
I doubt she is. I think these are carefully created documents to be neutral in Dr. Peterson’s probably planned upcoming battle with the University.
Rather than the institutional accolades, I’m more troubled by the fact that the chair is a Kantian scholar; didn’t know that the moral law could bend like the arc of justice.
I think the chair is probably very aware that Dr. Martin Peterson, a long-tenured white man with an endowed chair on the ethics of engineering, is the best possible person to have this fight. I would not be surprised if she and Dr. Peterson have been discussing this verbally (and the whole department, for that matter, in department meetings). This disinterested, completely impersonal tone is just right.
I think the tone of Peterson’s email to Sweet in the first email under Update #3 (and the phrases “Your decision”, “You are making”, etc.) shows that they are not collaborating on this.
I believe that it is possible to indicate one’s attitude toward the message in verbal communication while remaining deadpan in official written communication that is property of the state.
The communication being the property of the state doesn’t mean the communication is communication from the state. It can remain entirely “deadpan” anyway, for example:
—
Thank you for your email. The College leadership team and I have discussed your syllabus and the Provost office’s requirements for compliance with the new system rule 08.01. I communicated to them that inclusion of a topic is different from advocacy of a point of view and that therefore your syllabus does not indicate a breach of those requirements. I have heard back from them, and you have two options going forward:
Please let us know by end of business tomorrow how you would like to proceed.
Sincerely,
Kristi
—
I don’t know what the value is of maintaining this kind of deadpan diction but if it must be maintained, there it is.
As someone in a state with a law similar to Texas’s, communications via email owned by the university systems can be made public via GRAMA requests for terms. There are reasons to sound like a robot in writing.
I know, and that is why in my suggested revision I made sure to sound like a robot.
I don’t mean to feed speculation, but in all the academic departments I’ve ever been in, colleagues don’t address their emails to “Dr. So-and-so.”
One thing I found notable in my years at Texas A&M is that it was actually not at all uncommon for official department business e-mails to be addressed that way, even between colleagues and friends.
Bravo Professor Peterson!
A blatant attack on free thought and free speech.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that philosophy professors should be allowed to teach Plato.
What are they doing about all the cross-dressing in Shakespeare?
Or has nobody told them yet?
The English department was where the state began its crackdown on the university.
“What are they doing about all the cross-dressing in Shakespeare?”
Even more to the point: What are they doing about Shakespeare’s Sonnets (about half of them, at any rate).
Banning Plato from a university philosophy course borders on the ridiculous; however…
Not long ago there were discussions about bringing up topics that invaded students’ “comfort zone”. (I can’t recall more accurate terms. I hope this is adequate to identify that issue.) We need to extend the same tolerance too, say, a course on fascism that has students reading parts of Mein Kampf. We must be willing to extend the same tolerance to discussing issues we find reprehensible. That is a pretty clear categorical imperative.
I don’t recall the discussions in question, but was anyone suggesting that the university, through the equivalent of Texas A&M’s “college leadership team,” should dictate to professors whether they are allowed to teach material that invaded students’ “comfort zone,” over the strenuous objections of the professor about the professor’s legal right to teach that material, on the basis of a law passed by the state government about what material to teach in universities? Or were people suggesting that professors use their own judgment and determine voluntarily of their own accord that teaching material that invaded students’ “comfort zone” would be unwise for various reasons? (Secondary question: was Mein Kampf an example of the sort of text people were raising issues with?)
One can of course be upset about both situations for similar sorts of reasons, but it seems to me to elide certain important distinctions by lumping both together. It’s not equally intolerant to hold that the state should ban professors from teaching things, even if the professor objects, and to hold that professors should, using their own good judgment, elect not to teach certain things. The latter is what all professors already do, since you cannot teach everything in a course. Suggesting that exercising one’s judgment about what to teach includes (in some cases) excluding material that might invade students’ “comfort zone” seems potentially much more defensible to me than saying that the government should force professors not to teach certain things that the professor has used their judgment to determine they ought to be teaching.
I understand the distinction made, but when it comes to any form of censorship or self-censorship, it matters that the decision made by the author of the course is free from outside pressure. In the case of ‘student discomfort’ this is not always the case.
If you put a blanket ban on ‘outside pressure’, that’s telling me I can’t tell the professor I think they’re making a mistake. After all, that would be pressuring. And we’re back in free speech violations. Nobody should think free speech means other people aren’t allowed to tell you you’re making a mistake, or suggest that you stop making it. Indeed, that would be a free speech violation of its own. So no outside pressure can’t be the relevant criterion.
What’s tricky in these cases is not that there is any outside pressure, it’s that there are 10,000 people making the same suggestion. At some point between one friend saying “Hey I think you should reconsider this” and 10,000 strangers on the internet saying it, something changes. But I think (a) even in the latter case it’s not as bad as a state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence saying the same thing, and (b) we need better theory about just what’s wrong with group pressure case, and about what should be done about it.
My main advice, at risk of imposing outside pressure on others’ speech, is that all of us should be more careful than we have been the last decade or so at joining pile ons.
Gosh if only we had a distinction between persuasion and coercion!
Something like:
Persuasion: here’s a reason, form your own judgement
Coercion: here’s a threat, do as you’re told
If only this distinction between persuasion and coercion could be drawn cleanly in a way that settles the relevant cases!
It’s true it’s not always the case, but it’s also true that it’s not always not the case, right? Surely some professors decide on their own not to assign certain things, absent any pressure. And there is a third category: cases where there is outside pressure, but the pressure is irrelevant, because (e.g.) it is minimal, like one person who will scowl at you once if you don’t cave.
All of this discussion is lovely philosophy, but misses the practical point that the professor has pointed out. Whatever your feelings about any of this, under current law, this is *unconstitutional*. The university cannot legally violate the academic freedom rights of the professor by controlling the content of the course based on ideology. This is a long-held and deeply-rooted principle in Constitutional law.
This should be a test case before the Supreme Court to find out just how far its ideological capture has gone and whether the precepts of First Amendment jurisprudence have truly been destroyed.
One ought to be allowed to miss things one isn’t aiming at! I agree with you that the person posting under the name Charles Peirce is changing the subject from the main one by raising the issue that has become the topic of this sub-discussion. But people will talk about what they wish to talk about, including related topics.
You might suggest there ought to be a norm of ignoring people who try to lead the conversation in other directions. I should have just let Peirce’s point stand, and everyone else ought to have done so too. Peirce violated the norm, but two wrongs don’t make a right, etc. I don’t think there should be such a norm, but even if I did, I think that once someone breaks it, it’s open season to respond to their point. The comments section is threaded, so it’s easy to keep things contained, and if nobody is allowed to respond, then the initial norm-violators get to make their comments without any pushback, which seems to me unfair.
Who wrote the “Updated Course Description”? That looks like what got flagged by the AI that the staff was using to scan syllabi.
Does this rule also extend to bible studies as if I am not mistaken parts of that advocates the superiority of a particular race and a subservient role for a particular gender.
The part about neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither master nor slave? Clearly mistaken.
Is the second point in the chair’s letter a threatened punishment…?
This looks to me like Peterson’s preparing to sue the university. Does anyone know what the chances of success are here?
Very high
It depends on the Court. Maybe a win at the District court, a loss at the appeal, a loss in the Texas Supreme Court, a win at the federal level, eventually either salvation at the Supreme Court or the complete unmasking of a compromised and ruined Court.
It’s unknown because the concept of academic freedom in a legal sense is not very contoured. The courts, including the US Supreme Court, have noted that it is a special consideration of the First Amendment and that it does hold significance under the auspices of the First Amendment but, at least in the case of the US Supreme Court, they’ve also never clearly articulated that it protects individual professorial speech regarding what gets taught and how it gets taught in individual classroom settings. Hence, at minimum, it protects institutions themselves from some yet-to-be-determined amount of outside pressure against what they choose to impart but it’s never been determined to allow professorial speech or instruction to be sacrosanct either. The courts seem more inclined to pivot towards an institutional right more so than a broad right of professor’s to retain autonomy over curricular matters so one’s mileage may vary.
Strictly speaking, the instructor wasn’t told he couldn’t teach Plato, but that he couldn’t teach Plato the way he wanted to. So if he were to sue, it seems to me it would have to be for the right to teach however he wants to compatibly with the university-sanctioned course description. I’m not a lawyer, but that seems like a tougher case to make. Universities tell instructors what to teach all the time.
The problem is that it’s a mandate from the state based on political reasons, not an internal university decision based on academic criteria. Blatantly unconstitutional.
It looks like he was specifically told he could not teach the readings from Plato. His option was to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, “and the Plato readings that may include these”. If he wants to teach a Plato reading, he apparently will need the committee to let him know which Plato readings include or are free from the taint of gender ideology (or race ideology, or other verboten subjects). Otherwise, he has been given a clear and specific instruction not to teach Plato. After he explained how he taught it, that did not matter.
I think this is great news. It’s woke proponents of gender ideology like Plato that want to destroy our glorious Western Civilization. People like Plato need to go back and read the Great Thinkers of the past, who would never perpetuate the kinds of new-fangled post-modernist thought going on in the Symposium.
Plato Who? What happened our the great western canon?
Who cares about Plato if we have the art of the deal?
This is extraordinary. Still, it does show that at least one administrator had read a portion of one of Plato’s works, and that fragment of Plato might have started a chain of rational thought in the mind of said administrator.
Nah–the administrator just saw how Peterson mentioned Plato in his email, and inferred “that must be bad gender stuff.”
Just mentioning this in case it is useful to any folks out there. I interviewed for a tt job there a couple of years ago and was assured by all faculty that academic freedom was not and never had been under threat despite the government. I mention this not to slight the department of philosophy at all (my experience there was lovely!), but as a warning for all on the job market: take the political climate very, very seriously.
There is some chance at least though that if we take the political climate seriously enough, we dig ourselves a hole in the ground and hide there, well, for a long time. (And when we come out, the world will be burning and Trump’s family will be hanging out in the South Island (NZ) with his bodies…)
I mentioned in another post a few months ago that Texas A&M was hiring somebody with AoS in French continental philosophy and that would be a career suicide for anyone who applies for this, and how ironic it is that they’d hire someone for this. People were quick to respond in the same way you mentioned, but also that the philosophy department is against the current policies. It doesn’t seem like it, especially seeing as the chair is trying to enforce these rules.
I think it is difficult to tell what the department head is actually trying to do just from reading the text that she puts into writing in the official communication. When I was at Texas A&M, I was always told to maintain a strict differentiation between what messages I send from my tamu.edu address and what messages I send from any other email addresses I use (to ensure that the latter were not subject to FOIA requests). I was also told to be very careful about what was communicated in writing and what was communicated verbally.
Indeed. I know Kristi Sweet and there is *no way* in which she is in support of this.
So there’s no way that these committees are actually reading the content of each of the hundreds of syllabi. They are pasting them into AI and asking “are there any references to gender/race ideology, sexual orientation, etc in these readings?”
This will obviously give a “yes” for the Symposium. Moreover, Prof. Peterson’s two classes on “Race and Gender Ideology” are conspicuously named; almost as if he knew he would trigger this result (well done, there). The course textbook does not, so far as I can tell, contain any material on race, so this judgment can only be due to a superficial text scan of the syllabus itself.
I must emphasize how important this is: they are not delving into the contents of the readings. They do not have the time or resources for that. They are pasting syllabi into ChatGPT. Those who wish to evade or fight this surveillance should take this under consideration.
Yes, he was obviously baiting them. (Not that he shouldn’t!) Surprised Justin didn’t mention this in the writeup.
I’m sure you’re right about their methods, but fwiw, Ch 13, which is the assigned reading for the race and gender module, includes loads of material on race, including intersectionality, affirmative action, reparations, police brutality, etc. (All excellent topics to discuss in a course on contemporary moral problems)
Does that mean textbooks including content on these issues may no longer be prescribed? Will journals that publish on these issues be removed from the university library? What on earth 😳
If we go by the emails above, in some disciplines, some non-core courses or graduate courses that successfully pass a review of the syllabus and materials, and are given written permission by the “member CEO”, will be able to teach content on these issues. Very encouraging!
Someone’s taken “footnotes to Plato” a bit too seriously, I think.
When I was an undergrad at Rice University and we’d play TAMU in football, they usually beat us on the field and their fans usually outnumbered us at Rice Stadium. But the Rice students would cheer back, That’s all right, That’s okay, We’ll be your boss someday. And we always won half time.
The Aggies are a fine University, and it’s sad to see news like this.
My father was in the Texas A&M class of 1944. Although he didn’t officially graduate until 1948 because of a little intervention called World War II.
Say what you will about Aggies they are generally a very tough practical and smart group of people. They are not typically in the past men little snowflakes who might get their panties in a bunch of reading a Greek philosopher . This incident is sad and pathetic, and I’m sure my dad is rolling in his grave and the Fort Sam cemetery.
I know Sweet is only reporting the policy, but the move from “advocate” in paragraph 2 to the “clarification” in paragraph 3 that this means “include” is exactly the kind of two step that we were taught to look out for in my philosophy program, and this seems like the rare case in which a philosopher is more equipped than most to make some kind of practical action (however futile, and I’ll concede that I never went on to a grad program, so maybe there’s some secret they let you in on that makes this acceptable).
The move has to do with a second policy update the system approved, which is admittedly (and probably intentionally) vague but potentially implies that these topics can’t be covered in core courses
They can be covered in “specific non-core curriculum or graduate courses” – but only with the written permission of administrators, who are instructed to give such written permission rarely and only if including the content is *necessary*.
Since MAGA heads don’t know what rational discussion is, they assume the only thing we can be doing in the classroom is indoctrination.
This is a very interesting email chain. You can see some of the details of how serious scholars in philosophy are trying to keep their jobs amidst extreme political changes. For example, it appears that they retain some greater measure of freedom in non-core classes. This one got extra scrutiny because it is serving a broader public. The rationale here goes: I still get to be a specialist and scholar in my own special domain but when it comes to serving the herd we will do what they tell us. You can also see how someone the chair, who is apparently an accomplished and collaborative scholar in the history of philosophy, is willing to enforce this policy. Behind closed doors she may have disagreed with this but when it comes to implementing it, she is willing to do the work. Perhaps she had no good options. But when it comes to being an advocate for the field–this speaks louder than any work one could do in publications or conferences.
The forthcoming Texas A&M edition of The Republic stops at the end of Book I after Thracymachus punches Socrates in the face while shouting “Make Athens Great Again”.
Re: “…University ban’s Plato…”
“I picked a terrible week to stop snorting glue…” (the late actor, Lloyd Bridges, in the spoof, ‘Airplane-2’).
What’s next?
Will my former, ancestral faith…based in rome…decide a homeless, poverty-stricken individual…allegedly a ‘Human-Deity-Hybrid, crucified’…
…Is banned as well?
Although I am a ‘Wotanic’ NeoPagan, I used to like what my experience of ‘Christianity’ claimed their founder, advocated…
As M. Ghandi said:
‘I like your ‘Christ’; His Jihadist followers? …Not so much!’ (paraphrased, not quoted)
This is hardly the most important thing in this story, but it struck me: I don’t think until now I’ve seen a philosophy professor call the study of race and gender “Race and Gender Ideology,” on a syllabus or anywhere else. That sounds like the language right-wing politicians use to slander philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, queer studies, etc. Am I simply mistaken? I in no way blame Martin Peterson for the terrible thing that Texas A&M is doing, but it does seem to put a lightning rod in his syllabus needlessly. Why not call it something more accurate, like “philosophical approaches to the study or race and gender,” or something like that? This likely would have made no difference, but the weird use of the term “ideology” in this context grates at me.
My guess is Martin is using this language (taken from the absurd system policy itself) to press the issue and bring it to the courts.
That did occur to me.
You are mistaken. I got my PhD in 1997 and knew many people teaching courses with “Ideology” in the title. And I went to Purdue, which Newsweek famously called “a hotbed of rest” during the Vietnam War for its compliantly conservative resistance to the radicalization of American campuses. (I should note it is currently attempting to submerge and hide its level of actual current academic progressivism in the social sciences and humanities in compliance with a truly draconian set of orders passed into law by the Indiana legislature.)
The simple solution is to stop hiring Aggie graduates. I certainly won’t be doing so. Might as well say University of Phoenix on their diploma.
Great. I’m a year out from graduating and I’m going to wind up getting sent to the gulag for not being able to pay my student loans.
Newsflash: if you’re graduating in Philosophy you probably weren’t going to be able to pay those loans anyway. 😉
The winky-face emoji does nothing to detract from the mean spirited content of your post.
Having taught many of these students myself, let me say how embarrassed you should be to yoke them, the most vulnerable members of the graduate department, with the consequences of policy beyond their control rather than — oh I don’t know — assessing their work on its own merits. I would advocate hiring a University of Phoenix graduate if I judged that their research/teaching/service made them the best candidate. Sad that you trust your own judgment so little.
Doesn’t sound like much of a “solution” to me. Philosophy departments not hiring Texas A&M Ph.Ds is hardly likely to send shockwaves through the Texas legislature.
Some people here are saying the solution is to vote out the conservatives. In a global sense I agree. But more specifically, it does not relate to the real problem here. Do any of us want to live in an academic ecosystem where public opinion as understood by state legislators in gerrymandered districts are micromanaging what books we read and discuss?
The title immediately throws up red flags about the credibility of the article. Plato wasn’t banned, in fact the exact material here wasn’t even banned. It simply is being moved to a non-core course. The title is pushing an agenda, one that loses it’s impetus when it sits behind a falsehood.
This is not correct. The course the syllabus of which was evaluated is “Contemporary Moral Problems” (PHIL 111). Professor Peterson was told that in order to teach that class, he had to remove the Plato and other readings, or he could teach a different course, “Engineering Ethics” (PHIL 482), which, owing to its topic would presumably not include any of the banned readings. So it is false to say that the readings were being “moved to a non-core course”.
It’s not a falsehood. Texas may think that it’s not an issue of academic freedom to remove Plato from lower division courses, but they’re wrong about that.
You don’t vote your way out of this. Aggie alumni have to step in here. This is insanity.
I’m a class of ’80 liberal arts grad from A&M. I’m looking for any organized effort on the part of former students to oppose this. Anyone here know of such an effort?
Here’s some gender ideology: 1 Corinthians 14:34
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition
34 Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, as the law also says.
There is much more gender ideology in this book.
Do a little more research on the background of these verses, and include other verses, rather than cherry-picking, and I think you’ll find a more nuanced view. Women had a prominent role in church leadership from the very beginning.
“Separate but prominent”
“Silent and subordinate but prominent”, indeed
How is anyone going to discover that nuanced view when teaching gender ideology, and a text that includes it, is prohibited?
The AAUP chapter at Texas A&M has released a statement condemning this censorship. I encourage anyone working in Texas and other states with similarly hostile laws and policies to consider joining the AAUP, which is consistently fighting this sort of censorship and erosion of faculty governance. AAUP is affiliated with AFT and membership gets you access to legal consultations and protections and a legal defense fund.
https://aaup-texas.org/blog/f/aaup-texas-am-university-condemns-banning-of-plato
The AAUP have been ideologically captured by the woke fascists, and no longer consistently defend academic freedom. They’ve announced recently that they approve of diversity statements in hiring, despite the fact that these are commonly used as political litmus tests to weed out applicants with dissenting views on race and gender (and also as a pretext to justify discrimination against white and male applicants). The use of ideological litmus tests in hiring is, of course, totally incompatible with academic freedom, as the courts recognized long ago, during the McCarthy era.
https://www.thefire.org/news/aaup-continues-back-away-academic-freedom
There may still be pragmatic reasons to donate to AAUP if you might need access to their legal defense fund, but if your motivation is genuine concern for academic freedom, you should donate that money to FIRE instead.
How you can say ‘as the courts recognized during the McCarthy era’ with a straight face is for you and your conscience to come to terms with. But in a public forum, it is important to point out that this is the kind of collaborative propaganda that enables, and has already enabled, fascism.
And, yes, should you be so inclined, please do not donate your money to furthering fascism.
It was a series of decisions by the Warren court that put an end to the anti-communist legal apparatus created during the McCarthy era. These decisions include Slochower v. Board of Higher Education (1956), Kent v. Dulles (1958), and Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967). Please don’t opine on historical subjects you know nothing about.
The term “woke fascist” makes no sense. And rather than saying “dissenting views on race and gender,” why not simply say what those views are? I’m white and male and haven’t faced the “discrimination” you’re alluding to, and I know many others would say the same. Maybe it has less to do with being white and male and more to do with thinking that those are superior ways to be. Perhaps there are words that could describe what those “views” amount to, and reasons why we would not be “neutral” toward those holding them.
If you’re white and male and in academia, you’ve faced pervasive discrimination on the basis of your race and gender. The research documenting this discrimination has been posted on this very blog, on numerous occasions:
https://dailynous.com/2022/10/04/gender-in-philosophy-hiring/
In fact, bigoted discrimination against white men appears to be a universal feature of nearly all progressive-dominated industries:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
Oh, look. Bill Maher has entered the conversation.
I genuinely feel for my cohorts (white men) who haven’t got a job. And most of those I know who haven’t got a tt job are white men. And the proportion of white male leaving academia is much higher than in other groups. That being said, I still think white males are wildly overrepresented in most philosophy departments.
I humbly submit that if the AAUP angers the kind of people who use the phrase “woke fascists”, this is yet another very good reason to join the AAUP. Union solidarity from across the pond.
If woke fascists are so powerful, how come this country still doesn’t have high-speed rail?
But it has nukes!
Best way to get kids to read Plato, ban him.
Malicious compliance
Sam, is that you? 🙂
It’s not just TAMU that’s subject to this insanity. It’s all public Texas institutions. I used to be proud to be a sixth generation Texan, now I cringe at the cesspool of idiocy that politics has caused the state to become.
If I remember right, didn’t Plato’s teacher run into similar problems, although the consequences were admittedly worse. However, the persecutors didn’t come off too well either, I have to say.
So much for education leading to enlightenment.
So much for all that talk about the foundations of Western culture.
Boy do I have something to tell them about the history of Christian thought as well…
The core evil here seems to be stupidity. Persons in charge seem unable to distinguish between assigning a text for discussion and assigning a text along with a requirement that the student agree with it. Fifty years ago, I believe that this distinction would have been understood by all. (In the 1970s, I took a course in a public school on comparative religion. When the teacher assigned readings from the Bible, everyone understood that we were not required to subscribe to the inerrancy of scripture.)
Perhaps there has been so much indoctrination in schools and universities in the last few decades that some people assume that if a text is assigned the student will be required to hear and obey. Apparently, we have to send the administrators back to first grade and teach them some basic concepts.
Until something is able to be done about these two, this will continue as they will fill the Texas Legislature and the Governor’s office with those willing to do their bidding…
https://www.propublica.org/article/tim-dunn-farris-wilks-texas-christian-nationalism-dominionism-elections-voting
We seem to generally be agreed that this is awful. So, what can we do about it?
We can vote and get out the vote.
We can engage in public philosophy, especially in venues liable to be visited by independents or conservatives, pointing out why we think this is bad.
We can engage in public philosophy, especially in venues liable to be visited by independents or conservatives, to demonstrate the sort of work we do.
We can try to reduce bias in the academy, to reduce the impression that we are biased.
What else?
Fight fascism instead of attempting to bargain with it by constantly trying to shrink ourselves to avoid accusations of “bias”—accusations that will come regardless and which we cannot forestall by hollowing out the university and turning higher education into a meagre and vaporous phantom that power can easily blow away with but a breath.
I forget the comic, but I recall someone saying in recent years that the Texas GOP’s war on books goes back to the book depository of Dallas in 1963.
Personally, I think the DIY segregation of social media got so popular, everyone blocking out all things unfamiliar or uncomfortable, that too many expect the same over news media and schools offline. Nobody’s informed or enriched by blocking out the mass of reality.It’s like some bizarre self-confinement spell, a place for absolute cowards.
Bunch of pandering whipped dogs worrying about missing some $$$$ biscuit’s. Let people develop their own opinions instead of limiting exposure to a portion of the TOTAL
picture.
Class of 83,
Patrick Carmody
I know little about this, but doesn’t it seem likely that the intradepartmental exchanges here are part of a kind of stunt orchestrated by the department to highlight the absurdity of the university regulations? Like, surely the chair talked to Peterson about this over a beer, off official channels. Obviously, the chair doesn’t actually support this stuff. As others have pointed out, this case perfectly highlights the embarrassing absurdities of a certain current on the political right: yeah, yeah, traditional family values and the Western canon GOOD; queer debauchery BAD. But, hey, have you ever noticed that Alcibiades is going to fit in pretty well on the streets of San Francisco (my favorite character, to be clear)…or, hey, have you ever noticed there’s some, shall we say, funky stuff in the bible? Etc. etc.
The stunt angle was also my first thought.
Are there any open letters condemning TAMU and defending the professor/course/syllabus being sent around for signatures?
Politics be damned – Plato’s Symposium is a true masterpiece, witty, funny, and develops complex philosophical ideas through a discussion between guys at a drinking party. Three of the figures in the meeting are three of the most important figures in Ancient Greece and thus Western History. Socrates, the teacher of Plato is considered the Grandfather of Modern Philosophy. Alcibiades was a prominent Athenian Statesman and General. Aristophanes was the best comic playwright of antiquity.
Why is it being banned? – Aristophanes, who is probably drunk by this point in the party, says that people used to have four arms, four legs, and two heads. People moved around by turning cartwheels. Some were made of man and woman, some of woman and woman, and some of man and man. Zeus got mad at humans, and split them in half with a lightning bolt. Ever sense, the ones that were half man and half woman have been looking for their other half. The ones that were half woman and half woman are lesbian, and the man-man humans became gay. It’s a crazy story and I don’t think that any person with half an education would see this as any kind of ideology. Also, Alcibiades the general, when he was a beautiful young man said that he kinda fell in love with Socrates, who was old and famously ugly. Socrates tells him that he was only showing interest in Alcibiades because of his intelligence as a student. He wanted to initiate him into the highest form of love, the love of ideas and wisdom.
Socrates uses this crazy drinking party to discuss love and the ultimate love, the friendship between people who have the common goal of truth and understanding, “Platonic Love.”
Thank you for telling the story. After reading a few news stories about this chain of events, I was chastened by the realization that I had been reading the speech of Aristophanes as humor this whole time, rather than teaching it as the serious gender ideology proposal it was intended to be. Next time perhaps we should have scientific diagrams to help everyone understand the options, pre-and-post offense of Zeus. Oh, wait, now I’m starting to understand why they prohibited the content. Still not quite sure about Diotima, but my guess is she spoke too highly of love beyond the end game of child production.
Technical issue: If this was the original syllabus, where is the Plato reading in the weekly unit schedule? I see it in the required reading, but not in the subsequent sections.
Larger issue: I have always loved that Plato, along with ancient Greek drama and philosophy as a whole, turns out to be filled with inquiry into nature, sex, and what we call, gender. And what a pleasure it is to see that Plato/Socrates can still irritate the buffoons, charlatans, and dogmatists. Philosophy Lives!
We live in a new era of McCarthyism. I’m glad I’m 76 not 26.
There is obviously some motive behind moves like “banning the teaching of Plato,” or more correctly, banning the teaching of “woke” concepts in whatever form, be they Plato (??!!) or gender spectrum, critical race theory, whatever.
And that motivation is: (drumroll) stopping the migration to Texas of the kind of people who are horrified, HORRIFIED, I say, by this kind of censorship.
I’m willing to bet anyone that if they haven’t banned George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ they soon will. Afterall, you can’t have students reading about a dystopian society who primary slogans were, ‘War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery.’ It’s just too on point.
I was teaching an adult education course at a top ten university and was told not to include something in my syllabus that the administration of the institute I was working at thought might offend someone who they needed to placate in order to be able to work in another country. In fact, I had no plans to state anything in that part of the course that would have in any way been derogatory. However, I modified my syllabus and then wound up talking anyway in my course about the censorship that had been applied.
Why are the modules called “race and gender ideology”?
Because that’s…the topic being studied? O
I would guess this is a way to tempt the administration into the response they made. Peterson’s point is that introduction to philosophy should equip people to discuss topics of current interest, and that it is possible to do so without engaging in advocacy. The state government has explicitly said they only want to stop advocacy, but can’t help themself to just shut down discussion entirely. By drawing the lightning bolt down on Plato in particular, Peterson is making public what all of us already know, which is that the state government has no positive intellectual motive here but is just interested in censorship.
Closely related to this, the panic around “CRT,” which included calls to ban CRT (and, if memory serves, even legislation put forward to that effect) was also broad and encompassed much more than critical race theory. In other words, it also brought about a situation intending to shut down discussion entirely—in that specific case, discussion of racism. With prohibitions on “race and gender ideology,” it’s difficult to see this as anything but an attempt to shut down any and all discussion that could be seen to challenge the dominant “race and gender ideology” of the state. Heck, to even acknowledge that the state has such an ideology would likely contravene the prohibition, which also seems to aim at keeping the ideology invisible, even as it takes actions that make it very much visible.
I got my undergraduate degree from Texas A&M, and this news has seriously has me seeing red. Aggie jokes are a thing, but this thing is no joke. There’s no better way to confirm any and all of the negative stereotypes about the university. With my own diploma being cheapened, I have to take it personally.
I received my PhD in philosophy several years ago, and even though I haven’t been active in the field for a while I’m still offended when it gets assaulted like this. The A&M administrators have truly shown themselves to be on the side of Meletus (not that they’d know what that means). This from the people who spent years complaining about “cancel culture”? The people who said they were restoring free speech? The people who claimed they were all for diversity of viewpoints and letting students decide for themselves?
As it so happens, I’ve met Dr. Peterson several times. I wouldn’t say I really know him, but whatever your idea of a “race and gender ideologue” might be, he isn’t one.
As it further happens, I am running for the Texas State Senate in District 5, which includes the A&M campus. It’s a tall order for any Democrat to be elected in that district, but I can assure you that if I make it to the state Capitol I won’t take this lying down. I will make no end of noise about this free-speech hypocrisy and I’ll demand an inquiry into whatever “system rules” are being used to justify it. Actually passing legislation on the subject won’t be easy, but I’ll push on the boulder until I bleed.
I almost closed with an apology for using the Daily Nous for politicking. But now that I think about it, I won’t apologize at all. Sometimes a political response is just what you need.
Here is my campaign website, in case you’re interested.
I live in Houston, so wouldn’t be in your district, and can’t vote for you, but I can donate!
Thank you. It’s a tough campaign, but I am absolutely giving it my best shot.
In almost 30 years of teaching college in Japan, I have never been told what to teach. I have complete academic freedom here. No one has ever said the contents of my syllabi weren’t appropriate. I think this freedom extends to what I write and publish as well.
I’m not exactly a leftist, but I will be removing my Texas A&M alumni stickers from my vehicles, the fan signage from my yard, and my giving. The BOR will also be getting a letter, not that it will do any good.
I wonder if there’s any value to a bumper sticker that says “I’m an Aggie and I read Plato and I vote”.
I would be strongly inclined to show Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the course, if I were teaching it. It includes a lovely re-telling of Aristophanes’ story.
It’s just plain bizarre that presenting material is taken for granted as advocating it, or that a faculty member’s personal beliefs are considered determinative of the content of their courses. This is a paranoid belief about how faculty work.
Regarding Symposium specifically, what is meant to be advocated? Hangovers? The notion that we are derived from two-headed, four-legged, four-armed creatures the gods split in half? Alcibiades’ jealous depiction of Socrates? Diotima’s speech as reported by Socrates? Only a flat, literalist, incoherent, dull interpretation of the Symposium would suggest that the text advocates anything. It is one of the least conclusive of Plato’s dialogues.
Finally, fwiw, I wish people would refrain from taking the bait when someone makes the nonsensical claim that white men suffer oppression in academic careers. This is especially inappropriate to mention in regard to philosophy as a field. There is no academic field that discriminates more in favor of white males.
Well done, Dr. Peterson!
our entire profession should be ashamed that we’ve made this about plato instead of race and gender, which is the thing that matters here.
The policies at Texas A&M about the teaching of gender and race are indeed bad. One way to oppose them is to criticize the policies themselves (see here, for example). But when we’re handed an example of their effects that is not only highly objectionable to those who already think the study of gender and race is valuable, or who are already committed to academic freedom, but also highly objectionable to nearly any thoughtful person, it makes perfect sense for those opposed to the policy to give a lot of attention to that example. Doing so is nothing to be ashamed about.
It is shameful though. The policies are not just “bad”, they’re one part of what experts are starting to call “early stages of genocide” (https://www.lemkininstitute.com/single-post/experts-warn-u-s-in-early-stages-of-genocide-against-trans-americans). By making this about banning Plato, the entire profession can engage in a smug laugh-a-long of the stupidity, or absurdity or what have you, of banning philosophers from teaching the “father of Western philosophy”. All while the underlying issue, the erasure of whole groups of people at a scale that, again, for some groups is being recognised as “early stages of genocide”, continues on. There is nothing in the latter that could invite the witty jokes and indignations that we’ve seen throughout this thread. Or the kind of responses you see online: advertising paperback copies of The Symposium or off-brand T-Shirts.
If my hangman trips over his shoelaces as he’s walking to the gallows, I hope to chuckle, and I hope you do, too.
Very witty.
No public university’s Board of Regents, who are most often among the most conservative wealthy men in the area, should be allowed to make rules about what professors are allowed to teach or how they teach their courses.
This is of course despicable. Shame on Texas A&M and kudos to Professor Peterson. But I can’t help but note the further irony that Plato adamantly supported censorship in The Republic, especially in regard to what the guardians should be taught, to say nothing of the arts in general. I’m happy to defend the right to teach Plato but I feel kinda weird using him as a token of free speech.
Well, sort of. It’s not clear how literally we’re supposed to take him on this matter. He can’t literally mean that it’s always bad to use artistic representations of reality if he’s saying it by way of characters in a fictional story who are themselves using allegories. He seems more worried about the possibility of artists being uncritically taken as experts when in fact they are not.
I mean, I don’t know how else to take him. Books II and III are quite explicit about the need for state censorship in the education and culture of the guardians. We may think he’s right about it, or that the justification does not amount to a blanket ban on artistic representation (I don’t think it does, and of course Plato himself devises his own noble lies), but if one is looking for a theory of state regulation of pedagogical content, it’s right there. Let’s not whitewash Plato just because Professor Peterson is subject to unjust government interference.
You’re assuming that books II and III are to be taken literally as a blueprint for society. This is not the only way to interpret what he’s doing there. There’s also the interpretation on which the city is an allegory for the soul, and not about politics in the practical sense at all. Maybe “censorship” on that interpretation means “keep your critical faculties engaged when looking at art, don’t let yourself be swayed by propaganda.”
Fair enough. The soul-city analogies are explicit enough in the rest of the text that I tend to take those passages as being about the city, not the soul, and the parallel structures are highlighted later. But your reading makes sense too.
I do think it would be quite appropriate for Martin Peterson to include the relevant passages of Plato in his new “free speech” module – if they allow the parts of Plato that advocate censorship but not other parts of Plato, that would be telling too.
Agreed!
That’s a good idea. He could then ask: would Plato ban himself from the syllabus?
Thanks Daily Nous. I am trying to reach the university’s website to help us cover this astonishing story in a balanced way in the next Philosophy Now, but tamu.edu appears to be down right now. Is this what people call the “Iran option” or has the university recently changed its internet address?
Good job
Given Dr. Sweet’s scholarship on Kant, I wonder if she has any reflection on Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties as in any way analogous to her and other philosophers’ roles in relation to the Texas Board of Regents directives.
An invited op-ed: https://www.ms.now/news/plato-ban-texas-am-university-philosophy-academic-speech
Expect an uptick in sales of the Symposium
This will probably go to the void but I can’t stop thinking about this.
How does Texas A&M escape the following dilemma.
Either:
(1) they are a Christian institution of some kind in which case they are free to ban anything they like that conflicts with biblical doctrines but then they should just be explicit about this (although at the same time given the rich Christian neo-Platonic tradition this just seems totally unfeasible.)
Or:
(2) they are not a Christian institution in which case I cannot think of anything besides unquestionable religious dogmatic authority that would secure a counterclaim to anything that appears in the Platonic works under consideration, because the objection appears to be to the very possibilities under consideration that the philosophical work invokes, and absent argument, only dogma could block this.
So then the grounds for dismissal of the reading would be religiously founded and therefore religiously discriminatory. I will leave it to legal scholars how this connects to our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
As an addition, some of the attitudes in these texts are foundational even to ordinary Western life and distinguish it from stricter interpretations of public life for women, for example, in other places in the world. So then it seems baffling how someone at an American University in Texas of all places could potentially find problematic ideas that are so ordinary in our society like women having a place in public life, ideas ingrained in us that reflect our ordinary sense of how we should set standards of basic free behavior. Finally, it feels astounding, I must confess, to try to defend ancient attitudes that typically cut the other direction and lean deeply conservative and closer to traditional ideas for better or worse, but here we must defend in the other direction.
Maybe they’ll start awarding PhDs in Truthology in lieu of philosophy.