The Texas A&M "Censoring Plato" Story isn't what it Seems

How false premises are amplified by regime media for a typical anti-GOP hit job.

Earlier this week The New York Times came out with an op-ed from Greg Lukianoff, the long-time Executive Director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) about a seemingly shocking story: Texas A&M University’s philosophy department had forbidden a philosophy professor there from teaching Plato due to bans on gender ideology enacted by the Texas legislature and then subsequently adopted by A&M’s board of Trustees.

Lukianoff, a self-styled “civil libertarian” has in the past done a good job of calling out the left on free speech issues, particularly on university campuses, but increasingly in recent years he has targeted the right in a successful attempt to achieve “mainstream” credibility, a change that has even been noticed in, among other places, the New York Times. Sadly, in its most recent attempts to be even-handed, he is aiding and abetting a left-wing political op so obvious that it is hard to believe that he is not, at some level, in on it.

In the Times op-ed Lukianoff relates the seemingly shocking tale of a Texas A&M University Philosophy Professor, Martin Peterson, who claims that the university made him stop teaching a text from Plato’s Symposium in his introductory philosophy course since it touched on the forbidden subject of “gender ideology.” Prior to the publication in the Times, the story had already been featured in numerous outlets nationwide, and was clearly being pushed aggressively by Peterson.

Lukianoff is happy to take the most principled possible position— indeed he has said that from the beginning of FIRE “We'd rather drive this bus into a wall than be unprincipled,” but his “principles” are completely abstracted from political reality, with no reference to whether following them actually achieves the goal of expanding the depth and breadth of opinions that can be expressed on an average university campus.

An earlier news article in the Times does everything it can to paint the supporters and legislators as “rubes,” and Prof. Peterson is happy to play the ingenue :

“How can we possibly teach philosophy without being allowed to discuss Plato, even if some of Plato’s ideas are a little bit controversial?” he asks the New York Times interviewer.

But even a cursory examination of the background of Peterson and his counterparts allegedly denying his academic freedom, suggests that not all is as it seems. A review of Peterson’s CV reveals that he had previously served on the college of Liberal Arts’ “Climate and Inclusion Committee” (DEI), a sure sign of a fairly far-left viewpoint.

But if Peterson is a DEI ideologue, what about the administrator who had “threatened him” with cancellation of his class?

Meet Dr. Kristi Sweet, the head of the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M.

Dr. Sweet, doesn’t exactly look like a screaming stereotypical right winger. Below was the email she sent to Dr. Peterson announcing the necessity of changing his course.

Now let’s look at Dr. Sweet’s CV. It looks like Sweet was a member of the Department of Philosophy’s “Climate and Inclusion” (DEI) committee from 2019-2023 (Chairing the committee in 2022) before the University banned DEI in Texas Universities, pursuant to a new Texas State Law passed in 2023.

Now I don’t know if Sweet’s letter to Peterson was genuine or performative. But her leadership in promoting DEI initiatives in the philosophy department for years would strongly suggest the former. Perhaps she is simply being handcuffed by more senior administrators. But there is no way that Peterson, the department’s director of graduate studies (and thus someone who works regularly with the department head) would not have been familiar with her general views. Therefore, the fine philosophical concept of Ockham’s Razor suggests that Peterson’s interactions with Sweet are disingenuous and that he and Sweet (and other colleagues in Texas A&M administration) are playing media game in an attempt to drum up publicity and paint the Texas legislators as bad guys, despite the fact that nobody who is genuinely concerned about gender ideology is at all worried that Plato is being taught in a philosophy class.

Rather, Peterson and Sweet are seemingly engaged in a pas de deux of malicious compliance with the letter of a regulation while totally ignoring its spirit. Lukianoff is surely smart enough to realize all of that, but is happy to ignore the obvious to score cheap rhetorical points against Republicans.

Smart Republicans, of course, understand the game being played exactly. The Times earlier piece quotes Brian Harrison, a Republican state representative and Texas A&M alumnus who has been a leading advocate for the new rules, arguing that it was “misleading and false” for professors to suggest that Plato had been banned. He added that critics’ objections were “dishonest, disingenuous and cynical” efforts to “hype up any actual or perceived issues.”

Showing an admirable grasp of political reality that eludes Lukianoff, he said, “What we’re seeing here is just actually further evidence that inmates have been running the asylums in Texas public universities for far too long.”

As part of its request to remove the material, Texas A&M noted that Peterson added the contested coursework to the syllabus after the regents put in new policies, but the professor insisted to the Times that he wasn’t “trying deliberately to be provocative” when he included the Plato texts.

This “who me?” attitude is totally inconsistent with the dripping sarcasm in Peterson’s statement to the Times that “I’m aware that many members of the Board of Regents probably disagree with Plato,” Dr. Peterson said. “They may not be aware of that, because they haven’t read Plato — who knows? — but it’s still a valuable alternative perspective.”

Peterson is a left-wing academic apparatchik. He chairs the Academic Freedom Council at Texas A&M that is supposed to protect scholarly inquiry— yet of course practically, such groups do nothing to promote actual academic freedom. They are simply praetorian guards for the campus left to challenge any attempts by the people who pay their salaries to exercise any influence at all over what is taught in classrooms. “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,” Peterson told the New York Times.

But that is indeed what we have had in universities for decades now, with seemingly no real concern from folks like Peterson. We have one perspective— or one set of perspectives— allowed in the modern university ranging from very far left to moderately left, with conservatives excluded from the debates entirely. And the truth is, Peterson is happy to have a Soviet style system, as long as he and his fellow ideological commissars get to play Stalin.

DEI extremist Peterson doesn’t care about academic freedom, neither does his fellow DEI extremist Sweet, neither does the New York Times, and neither, at the end of the day, does FIRE, since universities are even less free and open than they were 25 years ago when FIRE and Lukianoff began their “principled” advocacy. By taking naive libertarian “free speech” stances that ignore the way actual power and speech is determined in universities, FIRE and its allies insist on playing beautiful losers or dupes to enable a broader left-wing agenda.

Lukianoff, claims of course, that he is consistent in his critiques around free speech, but whatever consistency he has is the foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of a little mind. The problem at universities has never been speech per se, but the structural exclusion of virtually all right of center viewpoints. Without addressing that central issue, which FIRE (with a $32 million+annual budget) has never done effectively in a quarter century of activity, the question of whether one leftist is genuinely trying to stop another leftist from teaching Plato or whether it is all just kayfabe for the media to use in anti-GOP narrative construction is nothing but a rather ridiculous and disingenuous sideshow.

ADDENDUM: My friend Steve Hayward, who has toiled as a lonely conservative academic for many years, has an excellent take on this story as well.

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