Texas A&M bans part of Plato's Symposium

[A_Duck]

One thing we know is that few of the people debating this have actually read Plato's Symposium

A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2...

Or just the two sections in question:

Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half

Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm

[allturtles]

True, but I think it's rather beside the point. Administrators shouldn't be censoring materials from professors' syllabi.

[pvillano]

Imagine fearing the consequences of "people are not gay by choice, but because they are each halves of a eight limbed cartwheeling sphere". Young minds cannot handle such dangerous rhetoric

[aestetix]

Don't forget the extremely loaded context surrounding Alcibiades.

[codyb]

I've heard an uptick in derogatory terms being thrown around recently and while unsurprising, it sure is sad.

Recent events...

- Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----"

Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it...

"I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up

- My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people)

It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)

But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much)

- One of my other friends called something "gay" recently

"Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that"

I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it

All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too

[breckinloggins]

I am a former student and graduate of this department at Texas A&M. I just called The Association and informed them that I consider this completely unacceptable and will not consider donations to the university unless this policy is reversed.

I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.

Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.

[fuzzfactor]

I would say that the most respectable universities are traditionally institutions of higher learning.

It's always been possible for any of them to decline into lesser institutions of not-as-much-higher-learning as they started out with.

Wouldn't leadership integrity and actual scholarship make the big difference between those that are able to strive higher each generation compared to those who strive lower?

Who is it that wants to aggressively devalue Aggie degrees that have already been earned, especially in the eyes of the world, along with any to be granted in the future anyway?

It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.

[ashleyn]

It really begs the question of, how much is this obsession with controlling others' gender actually going to end up negatively impacting the US's competitive edge in higher education? Between this and firing qualified TAs who did their job, we're well beyond just impacting gender studies majors at Evergreen College. How much longer until it cuts into mathematics, merely because an author was part of the reigning administration's monster of the week?

[bo1024]

It’s an issue, but a small part of it. The funding cuts and immigration barriers have already laid foundations for a massive harm to the US’s edge in research and education.

[philistine]

The US got the bomb in large part because the Nazi intelligentsia didn't like Jewish physics. If the person who unifies the four forces is transgender, will the US recognize and teach it?

[pklausler]

Want to know what a retreat from the Renaissance and scientific Enlightenment back into medieval mindlessness looks like? This is what it looks like.

[jhanschoo]

I'm a bit peeved at this caricaturization of earlier eras. In fact, significant fields of modern philosophy received great innovation by churchmen, and they were of course constantly attempting to reconcile Christian dogma with Greek and especially Aristotelian thought.

One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.

[lordleft]

Not to minimize the significance of this but prohibiting a portion of a reading is like slapping a "parental warning" on a Rap CD in the 90s -- if I was an undergrad, I'd only want to read those excerpts more.

[petsfed]

The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.

[evan_]

The difference is people wanted to listen to Eminem or whatever because it's enjoyable, trendy music that's played on the radio and all their friends were listening to.

Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.

[UncleMeat]

The undergrads won't hear about it. The material will just silently not be on the syllabus and they'll never know. In this case the interference has broken containment, but this won't be the norm.

[gosub100]

Similar vein: reading in general is down, overall. Especially among young people. "Banning" a book isn't affecting anyone, it just gets a bunch of people riled up on two political tribes.

Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.

[BrenBarn]

It's wild how there's so much overlap between the faction that wants to champion "European culture" and "Western civilization" and the faction that will do things like this.

[trueismywork]

For them European culture means colonial culture, not modern liberal culture. So there is no dissonance.

[bediger4000]

I thought we were broadly against colleges and universities banning politically incorrect speech. Wasn't that a huge talking point 2-3 years ago? Didn't we bring back freedom of speech?

[lukev]

It's really depressing how the popular discourse around these topics so consistently fails to address any kind of bad-faith reasoning on topics like this.

Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.

But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.

[uncletscollie]

Freedom of speech is now defined as the person with the most power or who screams the loudest has the final say. That is what happens when you elect a dictator.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Who is "we" here? I can't count how many times I've argued against just an apparently broadly-held view that free speech ends at the first amendment and isn't a general principle that should be practiced at, eg., universities. Looks like when I argued that here, I was told that I should pick a different term for the principle of free speech in order to disambiguate from the first amendment (they recommended calling it 'my personal content preferences').

Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power.

I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.

[watwut]

Majority of that was bad faith argument designed to create exactly this situation. And it succeeded.

[satiric]

For those like me wondering what in this syllabus they should be looking at, the key bit is the required reading in the middle of the second page: "Plato, excerpts from Symposium" instead of just "Plato's Symposium".

Edit: weird. On the app I'm using ("Harmonic") it redirects to a syllabus PDF. But when I open in a browser it opens to an article.

[roody15]

“ Dr. Peterson said he would reluctantly alter the course and replace the disputed modules with “lectures on free speech and academic freedom.” But he was angry, he said, as well as bothered by the sense that students would receive a less rigorous, challenging education in his classroom. ”

Quite sad to see the school administration get compliance here.

[slater]

server seems to be hugged.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260107085450/https://dailynous...

[ofrzeta]

Let the king decide what to read in his universities and you are good. It's also hard to stomach how the professor said he doesn't teach "ideology" but the administration doesn't even bother to refute this or anything. They just stubbornly repeat their allegations and confront him with an ultimatum.

It's almost like the bullying is trickling down, right?

[aebtebeten]

I'm sure some philosopher somewhen had something to say about whether or not being alternately servile and arrogant constitutes living the good life?

[browningstreet]

Falling in line.

[aebtebeten]

When even an old independently wealthy dude whose favourite pupil thought some people are slaves by nature is too "woke", who can we teach? Dick and Jane?

(oh, I see the problem now; they're supposed to be implied to be, by strategic omission, old independently wealthy slave-owning dudes who were into the flute girls?)

[aebtebeten]

  PHILOSOPHY 101
  by Gray and Sharp

  See Dick.
  Dick thinks about people.
  See Jane.
  Jane thinks about events.
  See Spot.
  Spot keeps a close eye on the two intellectuals.

[damnitbuilds]

Woke vs MAGA, education is the victim.

[adamc]

This is where MAGA leads.

I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.

There is a dead comment below that tries to raise an argument but was killed instead. This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.

[foster_nyman]

Given sufficient historical context, this should not be surprising; Paul Graham's influence on Hacker News is foundational, as he created the platform to foster an intellectual community, personally shaping its culture, design, and moderation policies.

For me, at least, this is one of his most important essays and worth re-visiting from time to time - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan."

[DaSHacka]

> This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.

No longer? Flagging comments isnt a new feature, and if anything, the site has been getting more political as time goes on, not less.

[zeroonetwothree]

I hate this kind of politicizing... it was wrong when the left was doing it to force mandatory "diversity statements" and it's wrong now when the right is forcing removal of specific course content.

Professors should be free to teach whatever they want that's relevant to their courses. Students are adults and can make up their own minds.

[djoldman]

> I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.

There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[PaulHoule]

Funny that conservatives want people to read the classics.

[andrewflnr]

I'm pretty sure they still do, actually. What I suspect happened is that someone high up the food chain put out a broad directive to remove "gender ideology" without thinking too hard about the consequences, and then some relatively unimaginative admins lower down decided to implement it Consistently With No Exceptions. Just doing their jobs "fairly". I expect they'll fix the glitch, frankly, at least the immediate glitch.

[gsf_emergency_6]

Genuinely confused here: are you saying that those who are on the side of the professor are conservatives?

[dragonwriter]

> I am really confused with the fights around gender of the last 5 years. As a doctor I have a solid grasp of the five dimensions of gender (genital organs, genetic, social, psychological and legal). So there can be 2^5 = 32 genders

Biological sex has multiple dimensions, ascribed gender (which is social, and of which legal gender is one of many forms) has a number of dimensions per form that depends on the particular social milieu, gender identity (which is a mix of social and psychological) has multiple dimensions that vary, again, at least by social milieu, and many of the dimensions involved are not strict binaries. So both the base and exponent in your formula are unjustified.

So, no, doctor (of what?) or not, I don’t think you have a solid grasp of anything relating to gender.

[freejazz]

What a joke