Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M, is being instructed to drop readings from his course related to race and gender, including passages by Plato, or face reassignment, according to information we received from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
This follows new guidance from A&M’s board of regents that strips faculty of the right to determine curriculum regarding “race or gender ideology” and “sexual orientation.”
FIRE calls it “a fundamental assault on academic freedom, and the First Amendment prohibits public universities from deciding which viewpoints can be taught in a classroom.”
Here’s Peterson’s response to his department chair’s demand to “mitigate” his course material or be reassigned.
“I hereby submit my S 2026 syllabus for PHIL 111, Contemporary Moral Issues, for mandatory censorship review.
“The syllabus has not changed much since I last taught the course. I have made some minor adjustments to the module on Race and Gender Ideology and to the lecture on Sexual Morality. These topics are commonly covered in this type of course nationwide, and the material is discussed in depth in the assigned textbook (Fiala and MacKinnon, 10th edition). I also ask my students to read a few passages from Plato (Aristophanes’ myth of the split humans and Diotima’s Ladder of Love).
“Please note that my course does not “advocate” any ideology; I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.”
FIRE reported in December that the Texas Tech University System ordered its five universities “to comb through faculty materials to root out any of the state’s disfavored viewpoints, and Texas A&M ordered its faculty not to “advocate” for “race or gender ideology,” or topics concerning sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom, without getting approval for whatever they’re teaching first.”
— David Taffet