CeleryKills

It’s been unsettling to watch Texas A&M turn a passage from Plato’s Symposium into something too radioactive for undergrads to encounter. A professor there was told he had to remove one of the dialogue’s most famous sections because it includes Aristophanes’ myth about humans once being whole and then split, a story that briefly acknowledges a third human form. That was apparently enough to trigger new rules meant to stamp out anything that touches gender. It’s surreal to see an ancient text treated like fresh controversy.

What’s most striking is the contradiction. For years, conservatives have insisted that students need more exposure to the classics. But the moment a classic brushes up against ideas they find uncomfortable, those same voices want it cut from syllabi. The professor at the center of this, Martin Peterson, said it plainly: if you erase perspectives from the classroom, you erase the very conditions that make learning possible. Discussion can’t happen in a space where only preapproved answers are allowed.

And this isn’t an isolated flare‑up. Around 200 courses in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences have been flagged or canceled for including gender‑ or race‑related content, creating an academic landscape trimmed down to fit the insecurity of state politics. One professor even replaced the banned Plato material with articles about censorship. Students signed up for philosophy but ended up studying the politics of what they’re no longer allowed to read. That pivot alone says so much about the trajectory Texas A&M is on.

Coming from the Pacific Northwest, where open conversation is almost a civic value, it’s jarring to see a public institution shrink the bounds of what counts as teachable thought. Higher education is supposed to widen perspectives. It’s supposed to give students room to meet unfamiliar ideas and learn to think their way through them. When a university starts policing which parts of Plato are safe, it stops preparing adults for the world and starts sheltering them from it.

If public universities want to compete with private ones, they can’t afford to turn their classrooms into echo chambers. Censorship doesn’t build resilient thinkers; it just produces graduates who’ve never been allowed to wrestle with complexity. If Plato is now too “woke,” then the problem isn’t the text. It’s the fear of what happens when students actually start thinking.