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New policy prohibits professors from advocating for ‘race or gender ideology’ in class
A new course review policy at Texas A&M University that prohibits advocating for race and gender ideology is stirring up controversy after one professor says he was told to remove passages by Plato from his philosophy course.
Another professor also blamed the policy for the cancellation of his graduate-level ethics course this spring.
The university’s actions have prompted academic freedom concerns from a campus free speech advocate who spoke with The College Fix. However, a conservative student leader on campus believes the censorship claims are “fake news.”
Enacted just before the start of the spring semester, Texas A&M’s system policy 08.01 states that “… No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.”
The policy recently drew national news attention due to a conflict with Professor Martin Peterson regarding his “Contemporary Moral Issues” class.
Initially, the class included a module on “Race and Gender Ideology” in the syllabus, but the university told him to remove it.
Peterson taught the course many times throughout his 11 years at the university, he said in a recent interview with The College Fix video journalist Abigail Nichols.
“I started to include a module on race and gender issues in which I don’t take a stand, give arguments for and against various claims, and I let my students discuss them ,” he told The Fix.
“This semester I added a new reading to that module, namely Plato’s Symposium, which is one of the most important philosophical texts ever written,” he said.
Martin Peterson
“Plato is not Right. Plato is not Left. He’s not kind of a political figure in that sense. But he has controversial opinions. He gives pretty good arguments for his claims, and he makes claims about, well, gender issues, how we perceive each other,” Peterson continued.
Prior to the start of the semester, Kristi Sweet, Peterson’s department chair, told him in an email that to make his course compliant with the new policy, he must first “remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology” from his syllabus. Otherwise, he would be reassigned to another course, according to a recent blog post by Leiter Reports.
Peterson told Sweet in an email that those particular modules consisted of the class textbook and passages of Plato’s “Symposium,” and that his course “does not ‘advocate’ for any ideology.” However, Peterson said the university told him to remove that section, including Plato, anyway.
He complied and replaced the “censored material” with “lectures on free speech and academic freedom,” The Fix reported on Jan. 8.
The same policy was also cited in the university’s decision to cancel Professor Leonard Bright’s graduate course, “Ethics in Public Policy” after he refused to make the syllabus changes Texas A&M leadership requested, Inside Higher Ed reported last week.
Peterson, when asked if he believed the state should have a say in what literature is in syllabi, told The Fix that “as long as you can make a reasonable case that this text is relevant for the course you are teaching, then it should be up to the individual professor and that’s how all excellent research universities in the world do it.”
Peterson also emphasized that the opinions he expressed are his own, and that he is not speaking for the university, nor has anything negative to say about any person involved in this. A video of the full interview will be available soon on The College Fix’s YouTube page.
However, Justino Russell, a student at Texas A&M and founder of the conservative campus publication The Aggie Standard, called the professors’ censorship allegations “fake news” in a Jan. 13 article for his newspaper.
“For far too long, America has been engineering its own decline. We are the only civilization in history that indoctrinates its children to resent their God, their family, and their country; and then wonders why our youth are miserable,” Russell told The Fix in an email last week.
“We need a return to education, not indoctrination. Real history, not woke revisionism. Excellence, merit, innovation, hard work, biological reality, and truth, over DEI, and pseudoscientific trans ideology in the classroom,” he said.
In his article, Russell wrote that after analyzing the 2025-26 course catalogue, he identified 66 courses “dedicated to Ancient Philosophy, the Western Canon, Ancient History, the Bible, and the foundations of Western thought.”
The revision that the university required of Peterson “has nothing to do with Plato and everything to do with the class module being literally titled ‘Race and Gender Ideology,’” he wrote.
However, Graham Piro, a fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free speech group, expressed concerns about the impact of the new policy on academic freedom.
“The Supreme Court wrote that academic freedom is of ‘special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom,’” Piro told The Fix in a Friday email.
“We are concerned that the Texas A&M system is violating this basic tenet of academic freedom by censoring course material that administrators find objectionable. Including pedagogically relevant readings by Plato, even if administrators believe they are objectionable, in a philosophy course is a clear exercise of academic freedom,” he said.
“As FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff wrote, ‘If some of Plato’s texts can’t be taught in a college philosophy course, what, exactly, can be taught?’” Piro said.
However, a UC Berkeley scholar argued that those concerned with the required course revisions are missing the point.
Steven Hayward, a senior resident scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, called Peterson’s claim about Plato’s stance on homosexuality “academic malpractice to the first degree.”
Peterson wrote in a Jan. 10 op-ed in MS NOW that “in the ‘Symposium,’ Plato described homosexuality as fully natural and suggests that there are more than two genders.”
Hayward responded in a post last week on his personal blog, writing, “The speech Peterson cites above is given by Aristophanes, and any Plato scholar will note that Aristophanes is often used by Plato to provide outrageous comedy for indirect or ironic purposes.”
As Aristophanes’ speech refers to a “gender-fluid” type of person that no longer exists because Eros (the desire for the fullest form of beauty) guided humankind into a “‘gender-binary’ higher nature,” the text can be interpreted as the opposite of what Peterson suggested, Hayward wrote.
“If a course of contemporary moral issues wants to include a classical text that bears on permanent questions of morals, you wouldn’t find it in Symposium… [Peterson] clearly cherrypicked a handful of short passages that do not come close to representing the scope of the dialogue; he picked these for an ideological reason,” Hayward wrote.
MORE: Professor says Texas A&M censored materials in contemporary morals class
