At least 200 courses in Texas A&M University’s College of Arts and Sciences catalogue have been canceled or flagged by university leadership for featuring gender- or -race-related content — and, as it turns out, not even Plato is safe.
Back in November, Texas A&M University System regents unanimously revised a proposal stating that no classes “will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without a campus president personally approving of the course. This followed backlash from a viral video that led to the dismissal of high-level personnel.
Professors were required to submit their core-curriculum syllabi for review in December. As The Texas Tribune reported at the time, Texas A&M System leaders had begun using A.I. software to search syllabi and course descriptions for words “that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender.”
While some faculty members haven’t yet received feedback about their courses — despite spring semester beginning on January 12 — others have been asked to remove substantial material.
According to Inside Higher Ed, philosophy professor Martin Peterson was asked to remove several passages from legendary philosopher Plato from his Contemporary Moral Problems class syllabus. Peterson received an email from department chair Kristi Sweeney telling him that he could either remove “modules on race and gender ideology and the Plato readings that may include these” from the class or be reassigned to teach a different class.
As Inside Higher Ed notes, Peterson had chosen passages from Plato’s Socratic dialogue Symposium, which touch upon issues like gender identity and patriarchy. In an excerpt from the “Myth of the Androgyne” included in the passage, Greek playwright Aristophanes says, “First, you should learn the nature of humanity … for in the first place, there were three kinds of human being and not two as nowadays, male and female. No, there was also a third kind, a combination of both genders.”
“Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented,” Peterson, who also chairs the university’s Academic Freedom Council, wrote in an email reply to Sweeney. “You are making Texas A&M famous — but not for the right reasons.”
Peterson ultimately chose to replace the censored Plato passages with lectures on academic freedom and free speech. During a January 7 interview with The New York Times, he expressed concern over what Texas A&M’s new policy restricting class content means for the future quality of education within the university system.
“We cannot have just one perspective in the classroom,” he said. “Then there’s nothing to discuss. There’s nothing to learn. It’s indoctrination.”
Texas A&M’s philosophy department wasn’t the only one to receive censorship orders. On Tuesday, January 6, English department faculty members said they received an email from Cynthia Werner, Senior Executive Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, telling them that their core-curriculum classes could not include literature with major LGBTQ+ storylines.
“If a course includes eight books and only one has a main character who has an LGBTQ identity and the plot lines are not overly focused on sexual orientation (i.e. that is THE main plot line), I personally think it would be OK to keep the book in the course,” she added in a follow-up email on January 7, per Inside Higher Ed.
In the email, Werner also noted that English faculty may only assign textbooks with chapters that touch upon trans identity as long as they don’t talk about the material or include it on exams or in class assignments.
Insider Higher Ed reports that students enrolled in the sociology course Introduction to Race and Ethnicity were informed via email on Tuesday, January 6, that the class had been canceled “because there was no way to bring it into compliance with the system policy.”
Meanwhile, professors who refuse to alter their class syllabi are now facing lowered enrollment rates and the risk of their courses being canceled altogether. One anonymous professor told Insider Higher Ed that when they declined to remove materials featuring feminist and queer cinema from their History of Film Class, the dean resubmitted their syllabus as a non-core “special topics” class, causing enrollment to drop.
“The expectation is that a lot of those classes will ultimately be canceled, not because of content but because of underenrollment,” another anonymous College of Arts and Sciences professor said.
This classroom censorship comes in the wake of Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III’s decision to remove a dean and department head from their positions in September, after a video of a student’s objection to gender identity being mentioned in class went viral. In the clip, the student cites President Donald Trump’s statement that “he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology.”
The second Trump administration has tried to enforce Trump’s ideology by threatening to withhold federal funds from a number of educational institutions. In August 2025, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher — a Trump appointee — struck down two of the administration’s efforts to strip federal funding from K-12 schools, colleges, and universities that have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
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