If You Can’t Teach Plato in a Philosophy Class, What Can You Teach?
By Greg Lukianoff
Mr. Lukianoff is the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Martin Peterson, a Texas A&M University philosophy professor, was presented last week with a choice straight out of a dystopian novel. To bring his class in line with a prohibition on course materials that “advocate race or gender ideology,” he could either censor the part of his course that included readings from Plato or he could teach a different class.
The case illustrates the extent to which campus censorship has run amok in Texas: If some of Plato’s texts can’t be taught in a college philosophy course, what, exactly, can be taught?
A bill passed last spring by the Texas Legislature undercut faculty control on public university campuses and clamped down on what can be taught, the First Amendment be damned. Last fall, the Texas A&M University system separately introduced policy changes aimed at purging woke curriculums. Under these measures, administrators have conducted a sweeping review of course materials, aiming to root out officially disapproved ideas about race and gender that professors may impart to their students.
Dr. Peterson submitted the materials for his course on contemporary moral issues to a university administrator as part of one such review — which he accurately described as “mandatory censorship.”
This is a philosophy class that explores how classical ethical concepts apply to contemporary social problems. It includes discussions on the ethics of war, the death penalty and abortion. And to the apparent alarm of university leadership, it includes discussions related to race and gender.
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Dr. Peterson was told he could “mitigate” his course content to “remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.” Those readings included a portion of Plato’s “Symposium,” a classic of Western philosophy. In one of its most famous passages, Plato offers a haunting, beautiful idea: that we are incomplete creatures, wandering the world in search of our other halves, and that love can make us whole — even, in a sense, bring us closer to the divine.
To cut that material from a class because it might set off alarms about “gender ideology” would only further politicize the classroom. It is importing today’s culture war into the ancient agora — turning the modern academy into a parody of its ancient namesake, a place where discussion is replaced by prior restraint.
Texas A&M seems to have concluded that the safest way to handle the ideas contained in a classic text is to bury them. This is no way to run an institution of higher education.
University administrators and state lawmakers are saying, in effect, that academic freedom won’t protect you if you teach ideas they don’t like. Never mind that decades ago, the Supreme Court described classrooms as the very embodiment of the “marketplace of ideas”: “Our nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”
Texas A&M leadership seems to want, instead, to ensure that faculty members push the state’s preferred orthodoxy. It’s part of a broader effort in Texas and beyond to limit academic freedom.
In late 2024 The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that administrators at the University of North Texas College of Education had made over 200 changes to graduate and undergraduate courses, including to the syllabuses, course names and descriptions. Last fall, the larger University of North Texas system began a review of faculty syllabuses, and the University of Houston system said it was conducting a similar review.
Within the Texas Tech University System, which has more than 60,000 students, a Dec. 1 memo warned faculty members not to “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain specific viewpoints about race and sex in the classroom. These include concepts like “One race or sex is inherently superior to another”; “An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”; and “Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist or constructs of oppression.” The point isn’t that these concepts should just be accepted or go unchallenged, it’s that challenging them through a robust give-and-take is what universities are for.
The language in the memo echoes a law in Florida known as the Stop WOKE Act, which my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has been litigating against since 2022. A federal judge described Florida’s law restricting instruction in college classrooms as “positively dystopian,” recognizing that the First Amendment protects classroom instruction. Unfettered, Texas is following Florida’s unconstitutional example.
Texas’s authoritarianism does not end at the classroom door, either. Last September, my organization sued to stop a brazenly unconstitutional Texas law banning all “expressive activities” on campus between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. — a measure clearly aimed at campus protest. The law doesn’t even try to hide its targeting of “speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”
In 2023, the president of West Texas A&M University, Walter Wendler, canceled a drag show on campus, claiming that the show would be demeaning and offensive to women. He admitted that even though “the law of the land appears to require” that he allow the “artistic expression” to go forward, he was still shutting it down. (My organization is suing to allow the drag show to proceed.)
First Amendment advocates often warn about a slippery slope. Once censorship starts at the margins, core freedoms are next. In Texas, university administrators and state commissars are skipping the slope and going straight for the trap door.
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