Texas A&M is banning Plato, citing his “gender ideology.”

Today, Texas A&M resumes classes for the spring semester—but a number of canonized texts will not be welcomed back to school. The public research university has lately been caught in the crossfire between state and stupid.

As The Texas Tribune has reported, faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences were informed just last week that “a new system policy restricting classroom discussions of race and gender” is set to take effect today.

The policy, engineered and approved by the Texas A&M University Regents last November, requires that the school’s president sign off on every syllabus with an eye to scrubbing “problematic” content. But the foes were loosely framed.

Under the new restrictions, gender ideology is defined as “a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.” Race ideology entails “attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity” or anything that “promotes activism on issues related to race or ethnicity rather than academic instruction.”

As a European history professor pointed out at the time, this wording could effectively prohibit a professor from teaching about the Holocaust.

The regents used AI analysis software to audit syllabi for unapproved content. Thanks to this rude mech, 200 courses have been cancelled, stripped of core curricular credit value, or forced into revision.

The hammer came down over the weekend for assorted religion, film, ethnic studies, sociology, communications, and literature classes. And in a truly-beyond-parody move, a philosophy professor, Martin Peterson, was told to “either remove ‘modules on race and gender ideology'” from his course, or be reassigned to teach a different class entirely.

Most philosophy nerds will recognize the “gender ideology” readings in question, which are lifted from the Symposium. The university apparently quibbled with Plato’s reference the the “Myth of Androgyne,” in which Aristophanes describes three genders.

Most musical theatre nerds will also catch the reference—the same myth was called up in Stephen Trask’s epic ballad, “The Origin of Love,” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. 

Even as we note the rise of smoothbrain rhetoric sea to sea, the fact that Plato has been deemed inappropriate for an Introduction to Philosophy course is a surreal escalation of terms.

Meanwhile, A&M students are set to be deprived of so much recent world. Including but not limited to “literature with major plot lines that concern gay, lesbian or transgender identities,” feminist and queer film, or race and ethnicity as a subject…fullstop. 

As Abby Monteil at them reports, these curricular restrictions have all trickled down from the Trump administration, which continues to dangle federal funding as a carrot for universities compliant with its agenda. We simply hate to see it.

As you go about your reading today, pour one out for the Aggies.