In an inevitable outcome following November’s adoption of new academic censorship policies by the Texas A&M Board of Regents, a philosophy professor at the “university” has been told to stop having students read passages by Plato in a first-year Contemporary Moral Problems course that’s set to begin next week. Professor Martin Peterson was informed that he must scrap a two-week unit on “Race and Gender Ideology,” and another lecture on “sexual morality,” along with the dangerous readings from Plato and the class textbook.
Dr. Peterson shared the warning from his department chair, Dr. Kristi Sweet, which passed along the verdict of the College of Arts and Sciences’ “leadership team,” which vets course syllabi for compliance with “Rule 08.01,” the University’s ban on allegedly illegal knowledge, in keeping with executive orders from Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott. Sweet informed Peterson that if he didn’t scrap the gender and race module, he would be assigned to teach another introductory philosophy class, “Ethics and Engineering,” and no we are not making that up.
Drop Plato and that race and gender stuff, or teach engineers how not to lie too much, please decide by tomorrow, kthanxbai! (Oh no, that class also covers “employee rights” and “environmental issues,” which could turn out to be a woke minefield too.)
Of course, this isn’t directly about Plato, whatever he got up to at his retreat. The supposedly dangerous passages are from the Symposium, on Aristophanes’ myth of split humans and Diotima’s ladder of love (whence comes the term “Platonic” love). Here’s a fun BBC video explaining the former, with its heretical pagan idea that, whatever our sexual orientation, we’re all looking for our missing half to “complete” us. If you’re reading this blog post in Texas, please turn on your VPN so you can’t be tracked.
You can see how that myth, with its straightforward explanation that humans were created with a range of sexual identities, would run afoul of Texas’s official pronouncement that there are only two sexes, and that even mentioning the existence of LGBTQ people is a form of “indoctrination.” As ever, to preserve “Western civilization,” the only real civilization, young people must be protected from some of Western Civilization’s foundational texts.
But this is only partly about Plato, of course. The real goal is to forbid any state acknowledgement of trans people or America’s history of racism, because the state’s leaders decreed that trans people don’t exist and real history is divisive. Plato was simply collateral damage.
As finalized in November, Texas A&M’s bizarre policy updated the university’s Civil Rights Protections and Compliance rules to read, “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity,” without prior authorization from university administrators, and possibly written permission from the Commissioner of Baseball.
The document didn’t explain what “advocate” meant, which was pretty slippery since it’s supposedly a given that university classes are supposed to teach about ideas, not push ideology. But as with other vague policies pushed by the Right, the slipperiness is the point: Just including discussion of some topics is a big no-no. You can see that in the tendentious definitions the policy does provide for the newly verboten topics:
Gender Ideology – means a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.
Race Ideology – means a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society and public discourse because of their race or ethnicity, or assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives in other areas of the world. This also includes course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or ethnicity, rather than academic instruction.
Again, especially with the latter example, cribbed from a million cookie-cutter anti-“critical race theory” laws that sprang from a 2021 proposal by the rightwing “National Association of Scholars,” no teacher anywhere is teaching that students today should feel shame for past sins or that they bear guilt for slavery. But that barely matters, because the entire point of these laws and policies is to contain enough wiggle room to declare that any discussion of, say, systemic racism actually violates the rights of white people. Hell, next you’ll be saying highways are racist!
And despite the language of the policy, the point isn’t to ban “advocacy” of ideas about race or gender, but rather to banish the topics from classrooms altogether so rightwing politicians will just pretty please leave the university’s budget alone.
Peterson’s department chair made that plain in a December letter clearing up the real meaning of the policy. Whistling at high speed right past that verb “advocate,” Dr. Sweet explained that in practice, the Regents have banned the unmentionable topics of gender and race from the curriculum, no exceptions.
Put simply, this means that the Board of Regents has clarified that core curriculum courses, which includes PHIL 111 Contemporary Moral Issues, cannot include issues related to race ideology, gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.
In reply, Dr. Peterson submitted his syllabus for what he called in his cover letter “mandatory censorship review,” and by Crom he was not about to agree that “discuss” or “include” or “think about” are synonyms for “advocate.” Instead, he wrote, “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.”
Peterson went on to point out that if the university interprets the Board of Regents’ rule as complete prohibition, that would plainly violate the First Amendment, and he cited case law on academic speech to that effect. And he’s right: So far, the Alito Court hasn’t yet interpreted the First Amendment to include a loophole allowing states to fence off entire topics from being mentioned in the classroom, although we aren’t exactly brimming with optimism.
Nonetheless, Peterson received the ultimatum Tuesday, and the story quickly went viral, because “Texas Bans Plato” is an irresistible headline. It’s even better than that time in 2012 when Texas Republicans vowed to prohibit schools from teaching critical thinking, because it would make children reject God and other things their parents told them.
Dr. Petersen told the Texas Tribune that it was a pretty sad day for academic freedom, noting that “Plato founded the Academy, the very first university,” Peterson said. “If we cannot freely discuss Plato, we no longer have a university.”
The university, for its part, issued a statement insisting that Plato wasn’t being banned, unpersoned, or even being hidden away in a cave, heavens no! Instead, it was just that one rebellious philosophy prof had “included modules on gender and race ideology,” which are against the rules, you know. (Note that the statement said “included,” not “advocated.”) Other sections of Contemporary Moral Problems, the university pointed out, possibly with a wag of its finger, were in fact still using Plato, just not to teach about concepts that are anathema in Texas.
And what the hell, the bastards ultimately won, at least this round. The Times reports that in an interview yesterday,
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.
Good substitutions, at least. We honestly had hoped this story wouldn’t end with a Plato retreat, but we guess we should go ahead and retitle this piece “Professor Caves On Plato.”
[Daily Nous / Dallas Morning News (archive link) / Texas Tribune / NYT]
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Now if they'd just ban Plano.
I swear if it had been my syllabus rejected, I would not have been able to resist writing back, "It's not an IDEOLOGY. It's a REPUBLIC."