The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

The college that canceled Plato

A professor had to change his syllabus after it ran afoul of Texas A&M’s policy on “race and gender ideology.”

This episode of The Gray Area was guest-hosted by senior producer Avishay Artsy.

College ethics professors don’t usually make headlines that reverberate around the world.

And yet, Texas A&M University philosophy professor Martin Peterson found himself being interviewed dozens of times after university officials told him to remove the Greek philosopher Plato from his class on contemporary moral issues.

The reason? A new university policy limiting discussion of race and gender in the classroom.

Peterson’s syllabus included selections from Plato’s Symposium that discuss same-sex relationships and ideas about how gender identity is formed. He was notified in January by the head of his department that the readings violated Texas A&M Board of Regents’ policy barring “race and gender ideology.”

Peterson, who also serves as the campus chair of the Academic Freedom Council, fired back, calling the directive “an outright violation of one of the most basic principles of academic freedom.”

In April, he resigned from his tenured Texas A&M position to take a new job at Southern Methodist University.

I invited Peterson onto The Gray Area to talk about what happened, who should decide what’s taught in a university classroom, and why he thinks we should all be reading Plato. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday and Friday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a philosophy professor. You’ve been teaching for a couple of decades now. In January, you were asked to revise the syllabus for one of your classes. Can you tell me what happened?

I teach a course on contemporary moral issues. And I asked my students to read Plato’s Symposium, and the university decided that we cannot assign that text because it’s “woke.” It brings up topics related to gender issues, and that’s not permissible, according to the university.

We have a new policy in place for certain topics that we aren’t allowed to talk about at all. And that’s one of those issues. So I was told not to teach Plato, and I’m in the philosophy department. That’s, of course, absurd. Everyone understands that in the philosophy department, professors must be allowed to teach Plato, right?

Can you tell me more about this specific text, Plato’s Symposium? What does it cover and why did you teach it as part of this class, Contemporary Moral Issues?

It’s a text about the nature of love. Plato discusses many different forms of love. He dismisses ordinary love between men and women: physical, sexual attraction, etc. The highest form of love is love of philosophy and more abstract feelings.

“Everyone understands that in the philosophy department, professors must be allowed to teach Plato, right?”

He also talks about same-sex relationships as being something fully natural and not something that we have to be ashamed of. And that was a part that the university had problems with, because according to this censorship policy, we weren’t allowed to talk about sexual identity.

The Symposium is seven guys drinking and giving speeches about the nature of love: Socrates, Aristophanes, others. Can you give us an overview of Symposium? What is it that they get into that made you want to include it in your class?

I wanted to include, in particular,........

© Vox