Plato, Texas A&M, and the Pregnancy of the Mind

​The media has had a field day with indignant headlines over Texas A&M University forbidding the teaching of Plato – in a philosophy class! There must be an Aggie joke in there somewhere.

But underneath the headlines are some deeper issues worthy of discussion.

The Texas A&M University System’s Board of Regents voted in November to require professors to seek the approval of their campus presidents in advance for any courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” They simultaneously prohibited faculty from teaching material inconsistent with a course’s approved syllabus.

Since Texas A&M is a public institution, it can be directed – or at least influenced – by public policy in a way that a private university cannot. The board was responding to the widespread conviction within the conservative majority in the Texas Legislature that “gender studies” is too ideological and crowds out serious studies with turgid, jargony papers.

But Plato is anything but turgid or jargony. The philosopher who invented the concept of academia had a lot to say about sex. The many facets of Plato’s discussion on eros provoke critical thinking, as it was meant to.

The proposed curricula included parts of Plato’s Symposium in which seven characters express varying views on sexuality. One speaker praises homosexuality as a way to create virtuous and courageous armies. Another extols the supposed benefits young males receive when having relations with older men. The drunken Alcibiades regrets that he couldn’t seduce the elderly, homely, Socrates.

Socrates, as usual, seems to speak for Plato when he turns from these earth-bound considerations to spiritual ones. He recounts a relationship he had as a young man with an older woman, Diotima. She taught him about the “ladder of love,” an escalation from physical attraction to a love of knowledge, ultimately to a sublime appreciation for Beauty. Socrates concludes by extolling the “pregnancy of the mind,” which gives birth to insights and virtue.

These passages would have also given Texas A&M students insights into Socrates’ unique take on eros as an invitation for the soul to climb the ladder of love. It certainly wouldn’t have corrupted them (leave that to the internet). Corruption of youth is the charge behind the sentence that resulted in Socrates drinking hemlock. Today, we just make the professor pull the course.

Texas legislators and leaders of the Texas A&M system alike should consider that their backlash is a mirror image of what they are reacting against. Is this action no less a betrayal of the First Amendment’s protection of the free expression of ideas than was the preceding, decades-long hostility towards conservative ideas (often disguised as “speech codes”)?

“This is what happens when the board of regents gives university bureaucrats veto power over academic content,” wrote Lindsie Rank of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.”

If all of this strikes you (as it does us) as impinging on academic freedom, you’re not alone.

“That’s not education,” tweeted FIRE, “it’s risk management.” The purpose of higher education, from a First Amendment perspective, remains the opposite of that, namely intellectual risk taking. Should faculty follow their syllabi? Common sense requires that they do. But the content of those syllabi – by whom should that be governed?
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After he founded the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson declared to his Enlightenment pen pal William Roscoe, “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

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