At Texas A&M, a philosophy class that was supposed to introduce students to Plato’s ideas about love and justice has turned into a live case study in campus speech rules. After administrators told a professor to strip Plato from his syllabus under a new policy on race and gender, he kept the course but swapped in readings on censorship itself. The result is a strangely fitting twist: a class once centered on the ancient philosopher’s dialogues is now organized around the modern politics of who gets to read what.
The fight is not just about one syllabus. It is colliding with a broader crackdown on how public universities talk about race, gender, and sexuality, and it is testing whether a flagship campus in Texas is willing to let administrators, rather than scholars, decide which ideas are safe enough for students.
From Plato to policy landmine
The conflict began when a Texas A&M philosophy professor was told he had to remove Plato from a core curriculum course because of a new rule targeting “race and gender ideology.” According to a detailed case overview, the directive came from Texas A&M University administrators who warned that keeping the disputed material could violate policy and trigger reassignment. The professor, facing a choice between his syllabus and his job, was effectively told to “Drop the” contested content or get out of the classroom.
Instead of quietly swapping in a different philosopher, he retooled the course around free expression, assigning students an article on campus censorship and planning lectures on free in place of the banned Plato modules. That move turned a bureaucratic warning into a national story, with civil liberties advocates arguing that Texas A&M University had crossed a constitutional line by punishing a professor’s choice of classic texts. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, publicly reminded the school that The First Amendment bars public universities from deciding which viewpoints students may encounter based on how administrators feel about race, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
A single syllabus in a sea of 200 threatened courses
What happened in this one classroom is part of a much larger shift inside the College of Arts and Sciences. Faculty were warned that roughly Faculty in the college might see about “200” courses flagged under the same restrictions, a sweeping review that reaches far beyond philosophy. A separate description of the policy’s reach notes that About “200” Texas A&M courses could be forced to change how they handle gender, race, and sexuality, including by pulling readings from a core course that was supposed to ground students in the liberal arts. For professors who design classes around contested topics, the message is clear: anything that might be labeled “ideology” is now a liability.
That pressure is already reshaping individual decisions. In interviews ahead of the semester, the professor at the center of the Plato dispute said he would reluctantly alter the course and replace the disputed modules with lectures on free, turning a philosophy requirement into a crash course on academic freedom. Local coverage of the controversy emphasized that this Texas A&M philosophy professor had decided teach Plato at all under the new rules, a choice that signals to colleagues how risky it might be to push back. When one syllabus can trigger a threat of reassignment, it is not hard to imagine how quickly “200” courses could be sanitized.
Free speech groups, PEN America, and a warning from Plato’s ghost
The backlash has been swift. PEN America, which tracks educational censorship, called the move at Texas A&M a new level of interference in university teaching and said it was unacceptable to scrub classic texts simply because they might make some people uncomfortable. In a pointed statement from PEN America, the group argued that censoring Plato over how he depicts relationships between people of the same sex sends a chilling signal about which histories and identities are allowed in the classroom. A companion release from NEW YORK based advocates framed the decision as part of a broader campaign to purge LGBTQ content from public education, warning that once administrators start redlining the canon, there is little stopping them from going after other authors who write frankly about race or gender.
The story has also drawn attention abroad, where coverage noted that University professor Martin Peterson was told to cut teachings about Plato’s treatment of love between people of the same sex under new “sexuality” rules. Philosophers have rallied in response, with one account, By Justin Weinberg, highlighting how colleagues like Andrew Fiala and Barbara MacKinnon see the ban as a direct hit on the discipline’s ability to confront difficult moral questions. For FIRE, which has cataloged the case as a Philosophy Professor Forced to change his course, the episode is a textbook example of how vague political rules can end up deciding which ideas students are allowed to debate.
In a way, the irony writes itself. Plato’s dialogues are full of arguments about who should rule, how to educate citizens, and what happens when a city turns on its own thinkers. When a modern university tells a professor to cut those texts or face reassignment, then watches him assign readings on censorship instead, it is hard not to hear an echo from the ancient academy. The campus may have tried to sideline one old philosopher, but it has ended up staging exactly the kind of argument he would have recognized.
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