Overview
- In a Jan. 6 email, department head Kristi Sweet told Martin Peterson to remove race- and gender-related modules and associated Plato passages from PHIL 111 or accept reassignment to another course.
- Peterson, who chairs the campus academic freedom committee, says the order violates academic freedom and is consulting legal counsel while considering potential litigation.
- The Board of Regents adopted the restriction in November and clarified in mid-December that advocacy on those topics is prohibited in core classes, with only limited exceptions outside the core or at the graduate level.
- Peterson’s contested readings include Aristophanes’ myth of the split humans and Diotima’s Ladder of Love from Plato’s Symposium, which his syllabus notes address sex, gender and same-sex relationships.
- The free-speech group FIRE condemned the university’s action and said Peterson was told to comply by day’s end or be reassigned, as the spring semester is set to begin Jan. 12.