The Plato Scandal is Fake News
The media claims Texas A&M is erasing history. The +60 courses in our catalog teaching Western Civilization prove otherwise.
You’ve all seen the headlines: The New York Times, Forbes, KBTX, Houston Chronicle, from our friends at the Battalion, the radical AAUP, even FIRE; all are pushing a narrative that Texas A&M has banned Plato. They say The Regents are “restricting… foundational philosophical texts,” “silencing 2,500-year-old ideas,” and “betray[ing] the mission of higher education.” They claim Texas A&M is “abandon[ing] its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust.”
These are really strong accusations. But are they really true? Not at all. It’s fake news. I analyzed the 2025-2026 Course Catalog and found that Texas A&M has 66 courses dedicated to Ancient Philosophy, the Western Canon, Ancient History, the Bible, and the foundations of Western thought. Take a look.
So what actually happened? Professor Peterson was explicitly using Plato in a module on gender ideology. A quick glance at his syllabus proves that his class was politically biased to the left. It lists topics like “gender issues,” “equality and discrimination,” “economic injustice,” and “climate ethics.” He frames the course around “themes of power, authority, privilege, oppression and discrimination” and explicitly wants students to “recognize practices conducive to discourse in a multicultural and globalized society.” These are liberal social issues, framed in Marxist language.
Yet Texas A&M, out of all the biased political topics he included, only told him to “remove the modules on race and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.”
It has nothing to do with Plato and everything to do with the class module being literally titled “Race and Gender Ideology” (see end of page 3), a direct violation of the restrictions on using taxpayer money to teach race and gender ideology.
The accusation that conservatives are the ones “erasing history” is pure projection. The past 50 years of evidence prove that it is the Left that has systematically purged the Western canon for being too “white”, “eurocentric”, “racist”, “colonialist”, and the usual meaningless insults. It’s always replaced with more “globalized”, “multicultural” and “diverse” subjects. This is not debatable and is not new.
A landmark report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) documents this: (Keep in mind it was done in 2011, and the erasure has only increased in the past 15 years, especially after 2020)
In 1964, 20% of the top 50 U.S. universities required a Western Civilization course, and 82% offered it. By 2010, zero of those top 50 universities required it, and only 32% even offered it as an option.
The situation was no better at public institutions. By 2010, out of 75 prominent public universities surveyed, only one (1.3%) required a Western history course.
Even for history majors, Western Civilization requirements have been obliterated. In 2010, 90% of the top universities had no specific Western Civ requirement for their own history majors.
This would be like Mexico not teaching Mexican and Spanish History, and their foundational texts, that got them where they are today. If you don’t know who you are and where you come from, how can you know what to do and where you’re going?
So it’s a lie that Plato or The Western Canon is being censored. As Matt Poling, the president of the Texas Rudder Association, said: “We wouldn’t allow a faculty member to advocate for slavery or pedophilia using [Plato’s] writings.” If a professor were teaching that the earth was flat, we wouldn’t allow it, whether he was using an ancient philosopher or not. If they were teaching lobotomies, we wouldn’t either. The same goes for any other pseudoscience, like gender ideology. The fact that we’re even having this conversation about allowing students to be indoctrinated into believing that the earth is flat or that there are more than two sexes is preposterous. It’s all about stopping the teaching of lies with our taxpayers’ dollars and starting the teaching of the truth.
As you can see, this had nothing to do with Plato himself, with the Western Canon, or anything of the like. It was all about lying to you, so that you’d be against the restrictions of race and gender.
But these common-sense restrictions are about breaking the chains of politicized academia and freeing us up for an American Golden Age. For far too long, we have been engineering our own decline by replacing truth with fake history, white guilt, and harmful pseudoscience. America was not built on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It was built on truth, hard work, and patriotism.
I can’t even begin to explain how thrilled I am for a future of real human achievement that liberates us: rocket travel anywhere on Earth in under an hour, permanent bases on the Moon, missions to Mars, cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s, inexhaustible clean nuclear energy, and exponential AI-driven productivity. A future where the suicide, depression, the anxiety, and the crisis of meaning that are far too common today becomes a thing of the past. I sincerely believe we can accomplish all that, and sooner than we think, if only we leave DEI, woke ideology, and pseudoscience behind us and instead renew an American Dream that is only possible with serious education rooted in excellence, merit, and truth.
Let’s make it happen!
Justino Russell,
Student, Founder, Editor
The Aggie Standard
