Universities have taught Plato for 2,400 years. The Academy in Athens opened in 387 BC. The Symposium was canonical in the medieval Paris arts faculty. It was canonical at Bologna, at Halle, at every serious research university that followed. Before the Texas A&M System Board of Regents ordered a philosophy professor to remove Plato from his reading list on pain of reassignment, someone on that board owed the rest of us an explanation of what we all knew, across twenty-four centuries, that the board does not.
The Fence Nobody Asked About
G.K. Chesterton left behind a rule. Before you knock down a fence in a field, find out who put it there. Texas A&M's board adopted System Policies 08.01 and 12.01 in November 2025. The policies restrict faculty from advocating "race and gender ideology." By January, the College of Arts and Sciences dean had told faculty that hundreds of courses could be affected. The review reached the philosophy department on January 7.
Philosophy department chair Kristi Sweet emailed Professor Martin Peterson that morning. Peterson had taught PHIL 111 Contemporary Moral Issues at Texas A&M since 2014. He also chaired the university's Academic Freedom Council. Sweet told him to cut a passage from Plato's Symposium, the speech in which Aristophanes tells the myth of split humans, from his reading list. The directive gave Peterson until end of day. He could comply or accept reassignment.
Timeline
November 2025: The Texas A&M System Board of Regents adopts System Policies 08.01 and 12.01, restricting faculty from advocating race and gender ideology.
"No serious research university in the world has a list of prohibited topics that professors may not teach," Peterson told FOX 26 Houston.
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On April 10, Peterson turned in his resignation. The letter takes effect July 31. He starts at Southern Methodist University in August as the Elizabeth Scurlock University Professor in Human Values, the endowed chair of ethics in artificial intelligence. His letter called Texas A&M "an institution of dead dogmas." He is the second philosophy professor to leave Texas A&M this semester over academic freedom. Linda Radzik announced her move to Binghamton in March.
The Policies Nobody Wrote Down Before November
Who
Martin Peterson. Tenured philosophy professor at Texas A&M since 2014, chair of the TAMU Academic Freedom Council. Starts at Southern Methodist University in August 2026 as the Elizabeth Scurlock University Professor in Human Values.
The defenders of the board will say they are conserving something. They are protecting the university's duty to parents and taxpayers to teach rather than propagandize. An undergraduate philosophy course should not double as an activist training camp. A Traditionalist concedes the point. The board's mistake was to skip past guardrails and build a list of forbidden texts, which is a different move from conservation, and a move that collides with four hundred years of faculty governance at the research universities the regents claim to be defending.
The more useful date is not 387 BC. It is September 2025. That month the university fired lecturer Melissa McCoul over a gender identity lesson. President Mark Welsh resigned within days. Between September and April, three philosophers announced they were leaving the department. In January, Dean John Sherman canceled public policy professor Leonard Bright's graduate ethics class on day three of the spring semester because Bright refused to itemize which class sessions would touch on race and gender. Bright chairs the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
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Learn more"I told them it was going to come up every day. During discussions, book reviews, case studies, throughout the course. There is no one day. That is how this class works," Bright told The Texas Tribune.
Dean John Sherman canceled Leonard Bright's graduate Ethics in Public Policy (PSAA 642) on day three of the spring semester. Bright is president of the Texas A&M chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
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Which Side Carries the Burden of Proof?
The burden of proof in any tradition dispute falls on the person proposing the demolition, not the one defending the fence. That rule does not care which ideological team the demolisher plays for. In this case the demolishers sit on the Board of Regents, and what they are knocking down is the older institutional norm that a tenured philosopher picks the reading list for his own class. That norm is not a DEI innovation. It traces back to the medieval universitas at Paris and Bologna, where the masters licensed each other rather than submitting their lectures to the bishop.
“"This is what happens when the board of regents gives university bureaucrats veto power over academic freedom." FIRE statement on the Plato order, January 2026.
Regent Sam Torn told the April board meeting that more than 150 classes across the Texas A&M System continue to teach Plato. That defense changes once you look at which side of the ledger the trend is running on. The university fired McCoul. Welsh stepped down. Radzik accepted Binghamton. Peterson signed with SMU. The second-order effects compound faster than the first-order wins.
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The Departures Are the Data
Texas A&M ended its Women's and Gender Studies program on January 30, 2026 and modified hundreds of syllabi at the flagship campus.
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Finance professor Adam Kolasinski of the Mays Business School called Peterson's censorship claim "absurd" at a recent campus forum. Texas Scorecard amplified the framing and called the Plato incident a "manufactured hoax." A Traditionalist will grant that reasonable people can disagree about whether Peterson's reading of Aristophanes pushed the Greek too hard. Philosophy seminars exist to resolve those disagreements. Same-day reading-list ultimatums from a Board of Regents belong to a different genre of governance.
What Does the Board Think a University Is For?
The research university as a form has existed for four hundred years since Halle. It survived because its knowledge-producing function ran on faculty governance over readings. Remove faculty governance and the research university is no longer a research university. It becomes something else, though the name on the sign remains the same.
A conservative instinct is supposed to caution against radical reorganization of institutions that have delivered for centuries. The Board's November policy is that reorganization. The label on the package reads "conservative." The method is what older traditions called vandalism. Peterson did not pick the word "dogmas" at random in his resignation letter. It is the oldest problem in the history of the university, and the current board has inherited it without reading the footnotes: you become the thing you set out to oppose when you refuse to read the old books with enough care to notice.
