Texas A&M deems Plato unnecessary for approved thought

Texas A&M has decided that Plato is not to be taught, a determination that suggests the problem is not ancient philosophy but what happens when people read it.

Texas A&M has decided that Plato is not to be taught, a determination that suggests the problem is not ancient philosophy but what happens when people read it.

As Daily Nous reports, the university has instructed a professor not to teach Plato’s work in a “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, an act that is both historically incoherent and politically revealing. Plato is not a contemporary provocateur. He is one of the foundational figures of Western philosophy, taught because his writing invites questioning, disagreement, and analysis. Treating Plato as expendable makes clear that the concern is not ideology, but cognition in the time of Trump.

I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato.

The Plato readings were from the Symposium, particularly passages on Aristophanes’ myth of split humans and Diotima’s ladder of love. The other readings are from Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues (10th edition) by Andrew Fiala and Barbara MacKinnon.

Professor Peterson had been contacted by his chair on December 19th about the review of syllabi for Contemporary Moral Problems courses. Here’s that email:

Professor Peterson replied to this, submitting his syllabus for what he referred to, correctly, as “mandatory censorship review”.

DailyNous

The move fits neatly into the broader effort to preemptively neutralize education by narrowing it. The Trump administration’s push to sanitize curricula and discourage critical inquiry depends on institutions willing to do the work quietly, under the banner of neutrality or administrative review. Plato’s offense is not radicalism. It is that his questions still work.

Plato is unnecessary only if thinking is. Texas A&M appears to have made its choice.