When Plato Becomes Contraband
A Texas university professor was told to make cuts to his syllabus. So, are the champions of classical education now banning the classics?
I’ve spent countless hours wrestling with ancient Greek. It’s a rite of passage for anyone who wants to really understand Greco-Roman history. While at Indiana University-Bloomington, I remember taking one semester-long course devoted to Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates’ final dialogue before he drank the hemlock that killed him. The Greek grammar alone was punishing: irregular verbs, shifting aspects, sentences that rolled back on themselves. My professor, in true Socratic fashion, would cold-call on us without warning. “Change this verb to the aorist.” “Now the perfect.” “What’s the difference in meaning?”
There was nowhere to hide in a class of twelve people.
Despite having a sinking feeling in my stomach every Tuesday and Thursday, those courses taught me more than Greek. It taught me diligence and the willingness to sit with difficulty until it gave way. It taught me that learning often requires discomfort. It also taught me that the Socratic method, named for Plato’s own teacher, depends on questions that unsettle rather than answers that reassure.
This is why the news from Texas A&M this week has gotten under my skin.
The philosopher who can’t teach philosophy
Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M, was told this week to remove Plato from his syllabus. His department head informed him that his Contemporary Moral Issues course needed to be revised to comply with new university policies restricting the teaching of “race and gender ideology.” The specific texts flagged: passages on Diotima’s Ladder of Love and Aristophanes’ myth of the split humans from the Symposium.
Peterson, who chairs the university’s Academic Freedom Council, responded with understandable bewilderment: “A philosophy professor who is not allowed to teach Plato? What kind of university is that?”
The Texas A&M system’s Board of Regents approved these restrictions late last year. Under the new rules, courses may not “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” Peterson maintained that his course didn’t advocate anything; instead, he designed his course to teach students to structure and evaluate arguments on contested moral questions. That distinction apparently didn’t matter.
Peterson will revise his syllabus. He told the New York Times he’ll replace the disputed modules with lectures on free speech and academic freedom. I suppose the irony writes itself.
Defending the canon by banning it
For years, conservatives have championed classical education as the antidote to progressive ideology on campus. Return to the Great Books. Teach the foundations of Western thought. Stop the drift into identity politics and grievance studies. When those principles meet actual policy, however, Plato himself becomes contraband.
A state representative who championed these restrictions dismissed professors’ concerns as “dishonest, disingenuous, and cynical.” He insisted that critics were wrong to suggest Plato had been banned. But Peterson’s department head wrote it plainly: remove the discussion of gender from “the Plato readings that may include.”
The university can parse its language however it likes. A philosophy professor received written instructions to cut one of Western civilization’s foundational thinkers from his syllabus.
The same lawmakers who decry “indoctrination” are mandating what can and cannot be taught. The same voices calling for intellectual diversity are demanding a single permitted perspective. Dr. Peterson named this directly: “We cannot have just one perspective in the classroom. Then there’s nothing to discuss. There’s nothing to learn. It’s indoctrination. It’s Soviet-style education.”
A pattern, not an anomaly
Texas A&M isn’t alone. As I wrote last year, Indiana’s Commission for Higher Education recently oversaw the elimination, suspension, or merger of more than 400 degree programs across the state’s public colleges and universities, representing nearly 19 percent of all programs. Among the casualties? Latin and Classical Civilization - the same fields that shaped my own intellectual foundation.
It saddens me that the humanities are being hollowed out from multiple directions. On one side comes the critique that classical texts are tools of oppression, artifacts of dead white men with nothing to offer contemporary students. From another comes the response that we should move away from those texts anyway because they contain ideas that make us uncomfortable.
I don’t think these are the same impulse, though they converge on the same outcome. Students lose access to the difficult, generative encounter with ideas that formed the backbone of Western intellectual life.
Plato asked questions about love, justice, the soul, and the ideal society. The questions that remain alive precisely because they resist easy answers. From my own experience, to run up against Plato in the original Greek or in a translation is to be unsettled. That’s the point.
Discomfort and the method
What I learned in those Greek courses at IU wasn’t just content. It was a mode of inquiry. Was I decidedly over the cold-calling, the endless verb conjugation drills, the two hours I spent parsing a single sentence? Absolutely! But these weren’t obstacles to education; they were the education. I learned to stay with a problem long enough to (at least try to) solve it. I learned that understanding often arrives only after confusion, frustration, and the willingness to be wrong.
Socrates himself was executed for “corrupting the youth” of Athens, which is to say, for asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable. The charges against him could be translated into contemporary terms without much difficulty. He was teaching ideas that certain authorities believed young people shouldn’t encounter.
Twenty-four centuries later, a public university in Texas has concluded that some of what Socrates’ student wrote is too dangerous for undergraduates studying contemporary moral issues.
The course will go on. Students will learn something. But they will not learn what it means to grapple with Plato’s arguments about love and human nature, to sit with ancient questions that have no settled answers, to practice the discipline of thinking through ideas rather than around them.
This tragedy is self-inflicted. Those who claim to defend Western civilization are stripping students of access to its foundations. They are not protecting young minds from indoctrination. They are preventing the kind of intellectual struggle that makes minds capable of resisting indoctrination in the first place.
Trust for Thought
What complex text or idea (one that made you uncomfortable) most shaped how you think? And what do we lose when we decide that discomfort itself is the danger?
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