The university is reviewing courses under new rules restricting teaching about race and gender. Administrators told a philosophy professor to cut some lessons on Plato to comply.
Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, was thunderstruck when he was told on Tuesday that he needed to excise some teachings of Plato from his syllabus. It was one way, his department head wrote in an email, that Dr. Peterson’s philosophy class could comply with new policies limiting discussion of race and gender.
Days before the start of the spring semester, one of the nation’s largest public universities is racing to interpret and enforce the A&M system’s rules. Some professors are reconsidering syllabuses at the direction of administrators, or are unsure whether they will be able to lead certain classes. Course sections are being canceled or potentially reclassified, threatening students’ schedules.
And professors are worried that they are losing the academic freedom they prize.
“A philosophy professor who is not allowed to teach Plato?” Dr. Peterson said in an interview on Wednesday. “What kind of university is that? Is that really what they want?”
“How,” he added, “can we possibly teach philosophy without being allowed to discuss Plato, even if some of Plato’s ideas are a little bit controversial?”
This feels like the modern day example of Indiana attempting to pass a law that would have inadvertently redefined the value of pi in 1897. It would have passed, but for a mathematician in the audience who spoke up. Nobody passing these stupid ass laws is sitting there going ‘oh yeah, no more Plato in philosophy class, that makes sense,’ they’ve just ideologically exiled anyone that would have told them why any of this masturbatory horseshit is a bad idea.