Plato's Symposium at Texas A&M: a curriculum dispute reaches the courts

Who decides which text may be taught in a philosophy class?

This month, in the United States, that question went before a court. Texas A&M University has been sued by a group of faculty members and by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

What the case is about#

Among the consequences of the university policy at issue, the complaint lists the following:

• A professor prevented from teaching Plato's Symposium
• The cancellation of a course on "Ethics and Public Policy"
• The closure of the Women's and Gender Studies Programme

The plaintiffs argue that the policy violates freedom of expression and academic freedom.

Why the Symposium?#

The Symposium is among the most widely read of Plato's dialogues and has been a fixed part of the philosophy curriculum for two thousand four hundred years. Its subject is eros: what love and desire are, what they direct us towards, how they stand in relation to beauty.

The dialogue takes place at a drinking party, and the speakers praise love in turn. Aristophanes' myth of the spherical beings, the doctrine of ascent that Socrates reports from Diotima, and Alcibiades' drunken entrance are its best-known passages.

Some of the relationships in the dialogue concern the forms that relations between men took in ancient Athens. That is the point cited as grounds for removing the text from the curriculum.

The philosophical issue#

The dispute here points to something wider than the content of one text: who decides which texts are taught at a university?

The classical defence of academic freedom says the decision belongs to the specialist who teaches the course. The reasoning is epistemological rather than practical: which texts in a field ought to be taught is a judgement only those who know the field can make. Content control from outside makes the expertise itself useless.

The opposing view holds that public universities are funded from public money and that the curriculum requires accountability of some kind.

The philosophical core of the argument lies in a distinction: is teaching a text the same thing as endorsing it?

Philosophical education assumes the two are separate. Nobody expects the teacher who assigns Nietzsche to agree with Nietzsche; nobody supposes that the teacher who assigns Machiavelli is recommending The Prince. If that distinction collapses, most of the history of philosophy becomes unteachable.

The wider picture#

The case does not stand alone. We have reported previously on the decisions by Dundee and Hertfordshire to close their philosophy programmes in the United Kingdom. There the reason was money; here it is content.

Two different pressures are converging on the same result: the room philosophy departments have to make their own decisions is narrowing.

---

The case is continuing. We shall follow it.