This episode of The Gray Area was guest-hosted by senior producer Avishay Artsy.<\/p>\n
College ethics professors don\u2019t usually make headlines that reverberate around the world.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> on contemporary moral issues.<\/p>\n The reason? A new university policy limiting discussion of race and gender in the classroom.<\/p>\n Peterson\u2019s syllabus included selections from Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/a> 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\u2019 policy barring \u201crace and gender ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n Peterson, who also serves as the campus chair of the Academic Freedom Council, fired back, calling the directive \u201can outright violation of one of the most basic principles of academic freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n In April, he resigned<\/a> from his tenured Texas A&M position to take a new job at Southern Methodist University.<\/p>\n I invited Peterson onto The Gray Area to talk about what happened, who should decide what\u2019s taught in a university classroom, and why he thinks we should all be reading Plato. As always, there\u2019s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday and Friday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, or wherever you find podcasts.<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n You\u2019re a philosophy professor. You\u2019ve 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?<\/p>\n I teach a course on contemporary moral issues. And I asked my students to read Plato\u2019s Symposium, and the university decided that we cannot assign that text because it\u2019s \u201cwoke.\u201d It brings up topics related to gender issues, and that\u2019s not permissible<\/a>, according to the university.<\/p>\n We have a new policy<\/a> in place for certain topics that we aren\u2019t allowed to talk about at all. And that\u2019s one of those issues. So I was told not to teach Plato, and I\u2019m in the philosophy department. That\u2019s, of course, absurd. Everyone understands that in the philosophy department, professors must be allowed to teach Plato, right?<\/p>\n Can you tell me more about this specific text, Plato\u2019s Symposium? What does it cover and why did you teach it as part of this class, Contemporary Moral Issues?<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone understands that in the philosophy department, professors must be allowed to teach Plato, right?\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t allowed to talk about sexual identity.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n I wanted to include, in particular, Aristophanes\u2019 speech, which is the part in which Aristophanes presents a theory of different kinds of sexual identities. He has this idea that at some point in the past, there were three kinds of people: male\/male, so a man and a man; female\/female; and male\/female. And then they split and now they search for their counterpart. So the male\/female search for the opposite sex, and the male\/male search for the same sex.<\/p>\n And then Plato discusses relationships between older men and younger men. That was very common back in Athens<\/a> at the time. We find that problematic today. And it is just reading stuff on his speech and discovering how ancient thinkers thought about certain types of relationships being perfectly normal and even valuable is revealing. It\u2019s perhaps shocking to some people.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not defending Plato or saying that Plato was right, but just discovering that those ideas and practices have been around for a very long time \u2014 it is interesting and worth having a discussion about.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t have to go into deep interpretations of Plato. Some people are keen to point out that later in his life, Plato probably became more conservative and seemed to prefer heterosexual relationships<\/a>, saying that they were somehow better. And we can debate the details, but just reading the text, that\u2019s what I encourage listeners to do. Go home and read Plato\u2019s Symposium yourself. You can find it online for free<\/a>. It\u2019s just a pleasure to read the text.<\/p>\n Is the Symposium, and this selection about gender and sexuality, the kind of thing that students would expect to read in a class like that?<\/p>\n Absolutely. Every week, we read one classic text or a couple of pages from a classic text. We read Aristotle one week, John Stuart Mill another week. So Plato fits very well into that mix of classic texts.<\/p>\n In late 2025, the Texas A&M University System Regents adopted<\/a> a policy that requires approval for courses that address race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. And after those changes were announced, you called them<\/a> \u201coutright censorship.\u201d Who are the Texas A&M University System regents? And as far as you know, why did they adopt this policy?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s try to explain this from the very beginning. In September, the university fired a lecturer<\/a> in the Department of English, Melissa McCoul. She was teaching children\u2019s literature from a gender perspective: Why are all children\u2019s books stories about heterosexual couples? Why aren\u2019t there any children\u2019s books with homosexual parents, for example? And that seems to be a perfectly acceptable way of teaching children\u2019s literature.<\/p>\n The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, tweeted<\/a> that she should be fired. And then the [university] president fired her<\/a>. And in response<\/a> to that, the Board of Regents decided to implement this new policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n The regents, the board members, are appointed by the governor. They are typically<\/a> successful businessmen, very conservative. It\u2019s a political process, of course. And they see it as their task to implement their governor\u2019s view about how the university should be run, which is problematic. The university is a public university. It\u2019s a public good. My view is that all students, regardless of their political orientation, should feel welcome.<\/p>\n The policy<\/a> does lay out a process in which a professor wanting to teach anything relating to those subjects of race, gender, and sexual orientation would need to have the materials reviewed, show that they serve a \u201cnecessary educational purpose\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s not clear how that\u2019s defined or who would determine it \u2014 but then you\u2019d 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?<\/p>\n No, I wasn\u2019t eligible for that. I teach a so-called core class, and core classes cannot get exceptions from the president; only non-core classes can be submitted for that kind of review.<\/p>\n Most courses we teach in the philosophy department of that kind are core classes, so it\u2019s by design. They don\u2019t want us to teach those topics. They designed the process so it sounds like we can teach them if we go through the process. But as a matter of fact, it\u2019s not a real option for us to do that. We are not allowed to submit to the courses.<\/p>\n You know, this policy is across the board. It affects other professors at Texas A&M. I was reading some of the policies, and it says that undergrads have to fulfill a cultural discourse requirement.<\/p>\n I was looking at the list of classes<\/a> that they offer that meet that requirement related to cultural discourse. And the classes are, like, Introduction to Race and Ethnicity, Introduction to Women\u2019s and Gender Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Human Sexuality\u2026 don\u2019t see how any of those courses could be taught under this new policy.<\/p>\n I agree with you. They cannot be taught anymore. And the cultural discourse requirement is being revised. Things aren\u2019t what they used to be anymore. Texas A&M used to be a university where students could take such courses. But not anymore. They\u2019re all being canceled or heavily censored or modified.<\/p>\n How are other professors at Texas A&M responding? I mean, they can\u2019t all be resigning. What are they doing?<\/p>\n I\u2019m the chair of the Academic Freedom Council<\/a>. So for me, it was natural to speak up and express our concerns. But of course, many, many professors agree with me, but we aren\u2019t so keen to speak out because it\u2019s too risky. We\u2019ve seen that people get fired. But I\u2019ve talked to lots of colleagues and many, many people think this is really bad. It\u2019s bad for the university; it\u2019s bad for our reputation. The value of a degree from Texas A&M will no longer be what it used to be.<\/p>\n Why do you think this got so many people upset? Is it just about academic censorship?<\/p>\n Some people probably think that there is something problematic about how some universities teach some subjects. And perhaps that\u2019s true. I\u2019m open to that possibility. But everyone understands that Plato is not dangerous. Plato is not part of a problem. Teaching Plato in the philosophy department can\u2019t be something that we should be concerned about. If we end up censoring the classics, someone that\u2019s been dead for more than 2,300 years, that just makes no sense.<\/p>\n People just laughed at it, and I guess it confirmed the suspicion that the far-right ideological push has gone too far. And that\u2019s my explanation here. And I should also say that if this had been a setup, I think the point would still be valid. I think it wouldn\u2019t really matter much for how people perceive it. If I had told you, which is not the case, that I deliberately did this, I wanted to provoke a reaction and I deliberately picked Plato, it would still be bad. Of course I should still be allowed to teach Plato in the philosophy department.<\/p>\n