When even Plato is too subversive

Censorship of Plato’s Symposium gets at the heart of what is “necessary” in a college education.

“Plato” by lentina_x, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

After an administrative review of his syllabus for the course Contemporary Moral Problems, Professor Martin Peterson was notified by his department at Texas A&M that some of his course content violated system policy and would need to be removed. The offending material included passages from Plato’s Symposium, one of the most beloved texts of Western philosophy.

I’m not a philosopher and certainly no expert on Plato. I was simply lucky enough to read The Symposium and other foundational texts when I was a freshman at another Texas university. They unsettled some of my most deeply held assumptions about right and wrong and forced me to reflect on beliefs I had taken for granted. I’m now a social scientist who specializes in the psychology of moral and political belief. It’s not an exaggeration to say that these works transformed my personal and professional trajectories.

Now, due to a new Texas A&M University System policy, Peterson’s students will not get the same opportunity. The policy, which bans introductory and core courses from “advocat[ing] race ideology, gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity,” seems to have been interpreted as applying to courses that so much as contain mentions of race or gender ideology. While the rule grants exceptions for materials that serve a “necessary educational purpose,” no exception appears to have been made for Plato in Peterson’s philosophy class.

I have a good idea why The Symposium was caught in the crosshairs of the new policy. In that text, Plato presents us with a cast of characters at a dinner party who take turns making speeches on the nature of love. One of the passages identified for exclusion from Peterson’s syllabus is a creation myth presented by the comedic playwright Aristophanes.

According to Aristophanes, humans were originally created like two modern-day people joined at the back. He describes them humorously as spherical beings, cartwheeling around on their eight limbs for speed. Males and females could be paired together in any combination, including an “androgynous” male/female gender.

Like the Old Testament God in the story of Babel, Zeus punished these original humans after they became too unruly for his liking. He split them down the middle, condemning them to an all-consuming search for their other half that would distract them from their mutiny against the gods. (Naturally, the gender of one’s other half determined whether they would seek out heterosexual or homosexual partnerships. Both were common in the ancient world.)

Aristophanes concludes that love, as the pursuit of the whole, is a vestige of our original unified nature. His final image of two souls seeking to become one, even in death, is as moving as his sketch of the spherical protohumans is funny.

On its surface, this is a story about the origins of sexual orientation and gender — both apparently no-no’s under the new policy. On a deeper level, it is a reflection on the human need to go beyond ourselves, limited as we are by our physical bodies. These themes re-emerge and develop in another passage Peterson will no longer teach, in which Socrates describes a “ladder” of different kinds of love. At the bottom are bodily pleasures; at the top is love of the essence of beauty; and along the way we ascend past romantic love and love for creative activities like art and science.

These passages raise fascinating questions, none of which Peterson’s students will encounter (at least not in his classroom): What is implied about the speaker’s views of gender identity if heterosexual men and women were originally created as part of one androgynous whole, while gay individuals were created all male or all female? How can we even conceive of the “essence” of beauty, and how can love of things like art and science rank higher than romantic love? How do these ideas compare with Biblical creation stories or alternative typologies of love, such as CS Lewis’s Greek-named four loves, which also inevitably deal with issues of sex and gender?

I suppose a petroleum engineer could get by in their 9-to-5 without ever having contemplated the nature of eros, so in that sense this text serves no necessary practical, career-training purpose. But if Texas A&M wants to develop students into more than specialists of a trade or profession, then what counts as “necessary” becomes a fuzzier calculation. Texas A&M’s philosophy department promises to “provide students with the skills necessary to appreciate more fully the central concerns of human existence.” Surely these could include, “what is love, and where does it come from?”

A policy that requires the removal of these readings from a college syllabus is censorship in its most obvious form, even setting aside the irony of Plato’s own role as the founder of the first university. It reflects a fundamental confusion (to put it charitably) between the views discussed in a text — which may or may not be endorsed by the author — and the perspective advocated by the instructor. To treat the classroom as if these discursive layers don’t exist is to say that students should never be exposed to a text containing the mere mention of a controversial idea.

But the truth is that every text with something to say about race, sexuality, or gender can be described as advancing an “ideology.” That has never been a legitimate reason to censor the material from the classroom, so why has it become one now? In prohibiting entire topics of discussion, the new policy is so vague that it can be invoked to censor virtually any text, making violations of instructors’ academic freedom all but inevitable. Despite the outcry, the latest on the situation suggests that Texas A&M stands by its new directive.

Universities are right to worry about ideological monocultures in the classroom. But banning discussions of race and gender is like bloodletting a patient to cure their cancer. Not only does censorship not work, it fails to address the root cause of real issues with campus orthodoxies and seems likely to only weaken the university culture of open inquiry. One outcome of Texas A&M’s policy is certain: students will lose out on precisely the formative reflections on seminal texts that universities exist to provide. Do these serve a necessary educational purpose? It depends who you ask.