德州农工大学禁教柏拉图，教授辞职抗议

teaching Plato in the philosophy department can't be something that we should be concerned about. If we end up censoring the classics, someone has been dead for more than 2,300 years, that just makes no sense. So, people just laughed at it, and

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I guess it confirmed the suspicion that the far-right ideological push has gone too far.

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Welcome to The Gray Area. I'm Vox supervising producer Avishai Artsy filling in for Sean Illing. My guest today is Martin Peterson. Martin is a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University. Earlier this year, the university asked him to stop teaching work by Plato because it violated a recently adopted policy limiting discussion of race and gender in the classroom. In April, he resigned from his tenured position. I asked Martin to come on the show 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.

Martin Peterson, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

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, Plato's Symposium, and the university decided that uh 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 a philosophy department, and that's of course absurd.

Everyone understands that in a philosophy department professors must be allowed to teach Plato.

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?

So, it's a text about the nature of love. Plato discusses many different forms of love. He is pretty dismissive. He dismisses ordinary love between young men and women, physical, sexual attraction, etc. The highest form of love is love of philosophy, more abstract feelings. But, 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 aren't allowed to talk about sexual identity.

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

Right. So, I I I wanted to include in particular Aristophanes' speech, which is the part in which Aristophanes presents a theory of different kinds of sexual identities. So, he has this idea that at some point in the past, there were three kinds of people. Uh male male, so the kind of attached to each other, a man and a man or females females and male females. And then they split. And now they search for their counterparts.

So, the male female, right, they search for the opposite sex. And then the male males, they they search for the same sex. Um and then Plato discusses uh relationships between older men and younger men. That was very common in that in Athens at the time. We find that problematic today. Uh uh Just reading Aristophanes' speech and discover how ancient thinkers thought about certain types of uh relationships being perfectly normal and even uh valuable is revealing.

It It's uh perhaps shocking to some people. I'm not a defending Plato or saying that Plato was right, etc., but just discovering that uh those ideas and practices have been uh around for a very long time. It It's interesting and worth having a discussion about. And we don't have to go into deep interpretations of Plato here. As some people are keen to point out that later in his uh life Plato probably became more conservative and and and seemed to prefer uh uh heterosexual relationships saying that they were somehow better.

And we we can kind of debate the details, but just reading the text but and that's what I encourage the listeners to do. Go home and read uh Plato's Symposium yourself. You can find it online for free. Uh uh it's just a pleasure to read the text.

Is the Symposium and this selection about um gender and sexuality the kind of thing that students would expect to read in a class like that?

Absolutely. So, every week uh we read one classic text or couple pages from classic text. We read Aristotle one week, John Stuart Mill another week. So, Plato fits very well into that mix of classic text.

So, in late 2025, the Texas A&M University System Regents adopted a policy that requires approval for courses that address race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. And after that those changes were announced, you called them outright censorship. Who are Texas A&M University System Regents? And as far as you know, why did they adopt this policy?

Yeah, let's try to explain this from the very beginning. So, in September, the university fired a lecturer in the Department of English, Melissa McColl. She was teaching children's literature from a gender perspective. Why are all children's books stories about heterosexual couples? Why aren't there any children's books with homosexual parents, for example? And that seems to be a perfectly acceptable way of teaching children's literature.

The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, tweeted that she should be fired, and then the president fired her. And in response to that, the Board of Regents decided to implement this new policy. And the Regents, right, the board members, they are appointed by the governor. They are typically successful businessmen, very conservative. It's a political process, of course. Um And they see it as their task to implement the governor's view about how the university should be run.

Which is problematic. The university is a public university, is a public good. Um My view is that all students, regardless of their political orientation, should feel welcome.

The policy does lay out a process in which a professor wanting to teach anything relating to those subjects of race, gender, sexual orientation would need to have the materials reviewed, show that they serve a quote necessary educational purpose. It's not clear how that's defined or who would determine it, but then you need to get approval in writing from the campus president to be able to include that in the course.

Are those steps that you went through yourself?

No, I wasn't eligible for for that. I teach a so-called core class and core classes cannot get exceptions from the president. So, only non-core classes can be submitted for that kind of review. And to be honest, most courses we teach in the philosophy department of that kind are core classes. Um so, it wasn't it's by design. We don't want us to teach the topics, but they designed the process so it sounds like we can't teach them if we go through the process.

But as a matter of fact, it's not the real option for us to do that. We can't We are not allowed to submit the courses.

You know, this policy is across the board. It affects other professors at Texas A&M. I was um reading some of their policies and it says that um undergrads have to fulfill a cultural discourse requirement. So, I was looking at the list of classes that they offer that meet that requirement related to cultural discourse, and the classes are like introduction to race and ethnicity, introduction to women's and gender studies, social and cultural anthropology, human sexuality.

I don't see how any of those courses could be taught under this new policy.

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Yes, you really yeah I I agree with you. They cannot be taught anymore and the cultura

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