To the Editor:
Reading “If You Can’t Teach Plato in a Philosophy Class, What Can You Teach?,” by Greg Lukianoff (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 13), reminded me of my first contact with Plato’s “Symposium” in 2003 at a seminar in China, where homosexuality was criminalized until 1997 and remains a taboo.
I remember the passage that shocked me — Plato’s account of a speech by the playwright Aristophanes on the origin of love: Humans were once titans, powerful enough to rebel against the Olympian deities, and as punishment were halved into incomplete creatures, doomed to wander the earth searching for their other halves. Once found, we will happily perish from thirst or hunger to remain in blissful reunion. The professor’s eyes twinkled with mischief: What if our original selves were fully male or female?
I reread “The Symposium” at Princeton, where I received a doctorate, and in Germany with my students. There is a debate about teaching Plato because of his anti-democratic political philosophy — though I am willing to defend the right to read Plato since if you cannot debate a dead Greek, how can you possibly debate living authoritarians or their defenders? I would have never suspected that a hauntingly poetic passage in the “The Symposium” would trigger American censors.
China has always had censorship, and the grip has been tightening under Xi Jinping. But Chinese reverence for tradition has so far protected premodern materials from censorship — another reason most Chinese humanities scholars have turned to premodern research.
The fact that American censors are working with greater zealotry than their Chinese peers is truly sobering.
Zhiyi Yang Frankfurt The writer is a professor of Sinology at the University of Frankfurt.
To the Editor:
While I appreciate Greg Lukianoff’s passion for freedom of speech, his essay does not take into consideration a professor’s responsibility to mediate the discussion of challenging topics without bias. Unfortunately, many professors in recent years have managed classroom discussions in ways that make certain students feel the need to self-censor or risk being ostracized for their right-leaning or even moderate opinions.
While I agree that the approach taken by Texas and Florida seems heavy-handed, it is only because many institutions of higher education have been ideologically captured. If only they were the free marketplace of ideas that Mr. Lukianoff imagined them to be.
Matteo Fiori Oakhurst, Calif.
To the Editor:
I taught art history and humanities graduates and undergraduates for 20 years at a public university. I can’t remember a class in which I did not teach Plato. One class that I inherited was Art and Social Protest, which spent half the semester on masterpieces by dead white men, and the second half on postmodern art, especially of the 1960s and ’70s.
We went through every art protest movement of the period — women, Black, Hispanic, gay, ecological and others — and examined the theories driving them. It was a rigorous class, and students loved it, with two sections overflowing every semester. I insisted that students did not have to believe any of the theories or like the art, but it was important to be familiar with these ideas. They could do their papers on any artist they chose, even if it was against the “liberal” ideas taught in the class.
No one ever complained. But I suppose that today I would be fired for even discussing race and gender issues, no matter how critical for understanding the art. Students are now being deprived of a legitimate place to converse about social issues.
Patricia Gamon Freeport, Fla.
To the Editor:
Along the way of rightly excoriating Texas A&M for censoring Plato, Greg Lukianoff wrote that it amounted to “turning the modern academy into a parody of its ancient namesake.”
It was Plato, of course, who founded the ancient academy as a haven for critical discourse. It needed protection and cultivation away from the heated political discourse in the agora, the Assembly and the courts of Athenian democracy.
Athenians never threatened the work of Plato’s Academy — despite its upper-class features — maybe because Plato held that democracy was the least unjust political order and that “academic” discourse would do them more good than harm.
By contrast, the policies of the anti-democratic MAGA movement intentionally undermine the academy in America because it manifests a relatively independent source of power.
John R. Wallach Montville, N.J. The writer is the author of “The Platonic Political Art: A Study of Critical Reason and Democracy.”
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