How Prof. Peterson Manufactured the Plato "Scandal"

While headlines portrayed Professor Martin Peterson as a neutral academic victim of draconian censorship, he has a DEI progressive background and manufactured this "scandal" to stop accountability.

Manufacturing a trap

Professor Martin Peterson had been teaching his PHIL 111 Contemporary Moral Issues required core class unbothered for years. We have access to his Fall 2021, Fall 2023, and Fall 2024 syllabi. Despite claiming in his email to the department head that he only made "some minor adjustments", here are the intentional and malicious changes he made:

1. He renamed the previous module from “Race and Gender issues” to “Race and Gender Ideology,” which is the exact same phrasing of Policy 08.01, knowing that it would inevitably get flagged.

2. He added the Plato readings which were not there in any of the previous years’ syllabi.

So not only did he purposefully rename a module with the exact title of the restricted political topics, but he threw Plato under the bus to make it look like restrictions on academic indoctrination were going too far.

Here is his Fall 2021 syllabi and required readings:

Yes, crazy expensive, I know. Taking advantage of

Here is his Fall 2023 syllabus:

Here is his Fall 2024 syllabus:

And lastly, here’s his flagged syllabus:

And here is the added online Plato reading he added:

As Adam Kainer noted in his sharp article: “Five minutes of tinkering with an old syllabus to use intentionally inflammatory language is not an exercise of academic freedom. It’s just dishonesty”.

Peterson’s legal brief, his coworker, and FIRE

If we keep going, and take a look at the email in which he responds to the demand, he literally says “I hereby submit my syllabus for mandatory censorship review” (emphasis mine). Did he know it was going to be censored? He also cites multiple Supreme Court precedents, such as Keyishian v. Board of Regents and Sweezy v. New Hampshire. To be honest, this reads more like a prepared legal brief than a neutral professor who really just loves Plato so much.

Let’s also take a look at the Philosophy dept head who is enforcing the restrictions. Kristi Sweet has been a member and subsequently the Chair of the Climate and Inclusion Committee:

And she has also received a “Cultural Enrichment and Diversity Grant”.

With that, she invited Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, to speak at TAMU in 2013. This is interesting because it means Sweet knew FIRE before the Plato scandal happened. So it might be that they had already established contact, and since FIRE was one of the first organizations to jump to defend Peterson, even using similar talking points, could they have given them some advice?

Following the union playbook

Peterson’s actions also appear similar to some recommendations outlined by the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-AFT). A recently leaked seven-page letter from the union advised Texas A&M faculty to “resist” their employers by refusing immediate compliance and using grievances to force administrators to document their actions, effectively slowing down university leadership. The instructions also tell government employees to use encrypted platforms and avoid work emails for coordination, since these can be requested through the Texas Public Information Act.

Neutral academic, or progressive activist?

Furthermore, taking a quick look at Peterson’s CV, we find evidence that he might not be as neutral as he portrays himself to be.

1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). He co-authored and was Co-PI (principal investigator) on this paper titled “Diversity, inclusion and equity in the engineering curriculum: Evaluating the efficacy of a new teaching module”. In it he talks about “Stereotype, Prejudice, Discrimination, Implicit Bias & Gender, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer individuals.”

   1. This was funded by an NSF grant worth $371,000 titled “The Ethics of Diversity-Fortifying Ethical Infrastructure to Prevent and Address Sexual Harassment in STEM Research & Practice Settings” (NSF award 1835178). On page 57, this paper says, “We aspired to place DI&E concepts at the forefront of the curriculum (Page 57)”. I filed a TPIA to look at the budget. It showed that Martin Peterson’s FTE (full-time employed salary) is $13,158 per month, which is about $157,896 per year.

      

      For this DEI study specifically, he earned $20, 942 for 1.5 months of work. Of course, he wants to defend DEI and Academic Freedom, which really means he wants to keep earning six-figures and even more extra taxpayer cash through “research” like this.

2. In 2015-17, he was a Member of the Climate and Inclusion committee.

3. On Abortion & Religion In a 2011 op-ed in Swedish titled “We do not want to restrict women’s right to abortion,” he and his co-author explicitly say: “We do not want to limit women’s right to decide over their own bodies.”

   1. “We are not involved in any lobbying activities, and we are not part of the Christian right.” “How can it be wrong to give more power to the individual woman...?”

4. On Right-Wing Swedish Political Parties: Beyond the classroom, Peterson’s political writings in Swedish demonstrate a strong desire for anti-democratic strategies to censor opposition. In 2010, he advocated for a "cordon sanitaire" to isolate right-wing parties, saying they are “xenophobic” and that just because 400,000 citizens voted for a right-wing party, “it does not follow that the most extreme opinions should also be allowed to participate.” In a second article, he even proposed the creation of an "anti-party" to systematically cancel out the votes of the right-wing party. This history of advocating for political censorship and cancellation makes his current stance as a champion of "viewpoint neutrality" appear inconsistent at best.

5. Trump hit piece The philosopher Kant and the lying president (NSD, 2017). In this article, he says Trump “lies forward and backward, without any scruples whatsoever” … “whenever it serves his own interests.”

6. In 2009 he put out an article talking about Plato being controversial and extreme in his views on democracy, assimilating him to some far-left party, but argued that he should still be listened to. This shows he was already thinking about Plato and freedom of speech for years…

7. More recently, here’s a talk he gave at Texas A&M, where he uses his philosophical outlook on ethics, like “racial justice and equity,” and applies them to some technologies (see last sentence).

8. Lastly, despite saying that he takes a neutral approach and does not advocate any ideologies in his class, Prof. Peterson has been consistently twisting Plato’s actual beliefs to fit his political agenda. He’s repeated multiple times that “Plato said there were more than two genders, at least three, and that homosexuality is fully natural, fully normal, nothing problematic”. The Aggie Scorecard will publish an article soon debunking this serious misrepresentation of one of the most important philosophers of Western Civilization.

If anyone is “lying to serve his own interests” like Peterson accuses Trump of doing, it might be himself.

Even Plato himself rebukes what Peterson is doing: “Plato famously reproached the Sophists for manipulating language to make the weaker argument seem stronger. When one considers the facts, one cannot escape the conclusion that Peterson is a sophist himself”, as Adam Kainer, Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word, states here.

It would be reasonable to suggest that left-wing faculty coordinated all this.

To conclude, here’s Prof. Kaiser again:

“If Peterson cared about the ethics of free speech and academic freedom, he could have assigned excerpts from Book X of Plato’s Republic, where Plato famously talks about censoring the poets… [instead] Peterson replaced the race and gender ideology readings and the excerpts from Symposium with a New York Times article about his case. One would think the complete removal of race and gender issues from an ethics syllabus would be criticized, but the social justice crowd has been silent. All of this is magnified because Peterson serves as chair of Texas A&M’s academic freedom council. When the chair of the academic freedom council uses their academic freedom in bad faith, other academics should call this out. The absence of dissent is deafening.”

This entire trap was manufactured to misinform people into opposing common-sense academic accountability. To learn more, read our previous article: Marxism, Sexuality Parties, and Gender for Toddlers: What Academic “Freedom” Protesters Are Really Defending.

Gig ‘em,

Justino Russell ‘26

Student, Founder, Editor

The Aggie Standard

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