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Guest Essay

By Greg Lukianoff

Mr. Lukianoff is the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Martin Peterson, a Texas A&M University philosophy professor, was presented last week with a choice straight out of a dystopian novel. To bring his class in line with a prohibition on course materials that “advocate race or gender ideology,” he could either censor the part of his course that included readings from Plato or he could teach a different class.

The case illustrates the extent to which campus censorship has run amok in Texas: If some of Plato’s texts can’t be taught in a college philosophy course, what, exactly, can be taught?

© The New York Times