Is Plato woke? Texas professor banned from teaching ‘Symposium’

0:00WBUR Podcasts, Boston. A serious research university shouldn't ban Plato. We don't make universities great again by censoring the classics. A Texas university bans Plato's Symposium from the philosophy curriculum for being woke.

0:30It's Friday, January 16th, and this is Here and Now Anytime. From NPR and WBUR Boston, I'm Chris Bentley. Later on the show, we'll remember Bob Weir, the founding member of the Grateful Dead, who died at 78. The story goes, a teenaged Bobby heard someone plucking a banjo in a Palo Alto music store. That turned out to be Jerry Garcia. But even after Jerry's death in 1995, Bob Weir made sure the music never stopped. Bob Weir was just a presence on stages for 60 plus years, and Bob probably played in front of more people than anybody in the history of performance. That's coming up in a few minutes.

1:16Also, a word to the wise, for all you foragers out there, be careful what you eat. Dozens are sick and three people dead from death cap mushrooms in California. Before we get to that story, though, if you ever took a philosophy class, you probably read some Plato. The ancient Greek thinker was a father of Western philosophy, writing on ethics, metaphysics, and politics. He was the most famous student of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle and the founder of the Athens Academy. But if you're a student at Texas A &M, you'll have to get that foundation on your own. One professor there is speaking out after Plato was censored from his syllabus because of new rules at the university banning the teaching of, quote, race and gender ideology.

2:09I'll let Indira Lakshmanan take it from here. Who's next? Shakespeare for his cross-dressing comedies? Virginia Woolf who wrote about a woman who pretended to be a man? Toni Morrison and Alice Walker who wrote about race? Martin Peterson is the Texas A &M professor who was told to remove Plato's Symposium from his philosophy course. Professor, welcome to Here and Now. Thank you. So, Professor, can you first briefly explain what Plato's Symposium is and why it got put on this banned list? So, Plato's Symposium is one of the most important philosophical texts ever written. and it's been taught for thousands of years to students without doing any harm to anyone.

2:52But, of course, Plato is controversial, right? He doesn't defend democracy, for example, but he also makes controversial claims about sex and gender. He claims that at some point in the distant past there were three types of humans, male-male, female-female, and male-female. So then they're split and then they're searching for their counterpart, so to speak. And he makes it pretty clear that homosexuality is something fully normal and natural. And that's, of course, relevant to tell my students when I talk about gender issues in my course on contemporary moral issues. You wrote in an opinion piece for MS Now that the ban on teaching Plato at Texas A &M only makes sense if you accept the university's new rules and reasoning.

3:40Explain that to us. Right, so the university has adopted a new policy that bans the content that talks about race and gender. And in a sense, in a technical sense, in an academic sense, it is correct. Plato does discuss gender issues in symposium, and therefore it has been banned. Not all of it, but some of the most important parts that I believe my students need to read. And I find that deeply problematic. A serious research university shouldn't ban Plato. We don't make universities great again by censoring the classics. Well, to me, it feels like trying to teach tennis without any tennis balls and, you know, trying to leave Plato out of a philosophy class is really kind of inconceivable.

4:28Was your reaction surprise? Frustration? What? I wasn't entirely surprised that I would get some sort of reaction from a university, but I was genuinely surprised that they would ban Plato. I have taught this course in the past and talked about race and gender. It was really funded by the NSF. I got some money for them to develop a course module on gender issues in engineering. Then I adopted it for this new course. But the idea that they would ban it completely when I added Symposium by Plato, that is hard to understand. I am still deeply surprised. Well, ancient Greek and Roman culture are often considered the basis of Western civilization and teaching.

5:16And a lot of conservative academics have said that we need to return to the classics. We need to stray away from some of the things that have been taught in recent decades that are from Eastern culture or African culture. So, you know, the ancient Greeks have been held up as a beacon in right-wing circles. So I'm trying to understand, is there a hypocrisy or a contradiction at play here? My guess is that people who make that claim, which I agree with at least to some extent, we should focus on the classics. That's a good idea. They don't really know what Plato wrote. They are basically ignorant.

5:53They haven't read Plato. And it's, of course, good that people are now paying more attention to what Plato actually taught. And it's a little bit of an irony, of course, that all this is happening. But I hope that something good can come out of it. And in the end, I think we must be allowed to teach Plato in the philosophy department. Well, you actually write in your opinion piece that Plato has been controversial because he's been a darling of authoritarian leaders. As you said earlier, he wasn't exactly a proponent of democracy. Is there a sort of, you know, strange irony in him being banned when he's actually been supportive of authoritarian leaders?

6:34Talk a bit about that. Yes, you're saying it very well. Absolutely. So one could imagine that people who want to change society and think that we are heading in the wrong direction and want to somehow control universities think that we should be talking more about Plato because Plato can be interpreted as supporting such claims. that just emphasizes how absurd this situation is, that of all possible philosophers you could censor, why censor Plato? He should be your favorite philosopher if you want to change the direction of higher education. So what's the reaction been on campus from students, colleagues?

7:16I have never received so much support before in my life. I have received hundreds of emails, not just from our academics, but from former students. There is a petition now that people are signing. And I should say that I understand that the provost and the president, they are doing their job. They have been tasked with implementing a deeply problematic policy. It's the policy that's the problem. No single administrator, I think, can be blamed for what's happening. It's a policy that needs to be revised. Well, as you say, it's a policy that's coming from the university's Board of Regents. Texas A &M is, of course, a state-run university.

7:55You've been openly critical of the Board of Regents. Do you feel repercussions from them or from the university's leadership? You're speaking to us publicly, but are you concerned about your job? I am speaking as a citizen. I'm speaking for myself, not for the university. And so far, no one has criticized anything I've said. They, of course, disagree, but they have not threatened to fire me. And I don't expect them to do that. They are decent people. I respect their opinions. They have one view about what we ought to do. I have a very different view. And I Regardless of their political affiliation, we agree that universities should be free to teach Plato and individual professors should be free to decide what readings from Plato to assign.

8:43We don't really want an authoritarian system in which the Board of Regents tells us what Plato texts are okay to teach and what texts must be censored. Let's take a step back because this last year has been historic under the Trump administration. attacks on higher education, efforts to control who runs universities, what they teach. The Department of Education has cut off funding and launched investigations into numerous universities. Texas A &M was perhaps proactively, protectively imposing this policy. Now that you've experienced truly censorship, a limit on academic freedom at your own university, What are your thoughts on what the whole country is going through?

9:30University students across the nation, fellow academics like yourself. What is the climate we're in now? This might just be the beginning. And of course, American universities are still the best in the world. And they are the best in the world because they're able to attract talent from all around the world and don't censor their professors. But there is a risk that we will not be able to attract any talent anymore. People don't want to teach at our institutions because we are being censored, and that's deeply, deeply problematic in my opinion. Well, I want to turn our attention back to students.

10:07You, of course, have dedicated your life to teaching students. I'm the mom of a university student and a high school student. What are the kids you teach missing out on with Plato and perhaps other texts now missing from their classrooms? They are being misled. They don't get to read Plato's text. They don't understand how Plato was actually thinking about gender issues in this case. There are lots of controversial philosophers out there, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, etc. What is left to discuss in the classroom? I'm not the victim here. My students are the real victims. Martin Peterson is a professor of philosophy and ethics at Texas A &M University, and he's speaking in his own capacity today.

10:56Martin, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

11:08Coming up next, another philosopher of sorts, once called death the last and best reward for a life well lived. That was Bob Weir. As a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, He toured with the Grateful Dead tirelessly until Jerry Garcia died in 1995. But Weir kept the band's music alive for 30 years after that, sharing it with a new generation of deadheads. His family announced his death on Saturday and said in a statement, We send him off the way he sent so many of us on our way, with a farewell that isn't an ending, but a blessing, a reward for a life worth living. After the break, Peter O'Dowd digs into why Weir's guitar playing was so notable, even though he hardly ever took a solo on stage.

11:56Time for the shortest set break ever, and then we'll be right back.

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12:56Deadheads around the world are not done remembering the life of Bob Weir. Fans will gather tomorrow for a public memorial in San Francisco where the Grateful Dead got its start. Weir was a founding member and a rhythm guitarist who died last week at the age of 78. He was a revolutionary musician, and as we're about to hear, his style transformed the role of rhythm guitar in rock music. Journalist Alan Paul covered the band for over 30 years. Alan, welcome. Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me, and thanks for paying tribute to Bob and his music. Yeah, you bet. I know you met him several times, maybe many times over the last few decades.

13:32What was he like to be around? Well, as we're going to discuss, his music was very open and free to collaborate. And that's why guitarists love playing with him so much. And I think that was reflected in his personality or his personality was reflected in the music. Once an interview was set, he would just sort of invite me to his hotel room. There was no handlers around. There was no sense of him being anyone super special. Of course, we knew he was, but he didn't carry himself in that way at all. He was, in my mind, he was a man of the people. And I think you see that reflected in the remembrances not only of musicians, but in fans, because so many people had interactions over the years that were friendly, open and courteous.

14:15Yeah, well, he was also a really unique guitar player. And that's what we're here to talk about today. Weir played the rhythm guitar, which is like the backbone of the band. It's an instrument that builds the structure of the music. And after he died, you wrote in The Rolling Stone that his approach to rhythm guitar was often misunderstood, overlooked, and underrated. What did you mean by that? Well, one of the things I mean by that is that even Grateful Dead fans for many years, I think, sort of overlooked his importance. And there were times where he was made fun of. He looked so different from the other guys.

14:48I mean, he was the cute, handsome, clean-cut guy for years. He would wear these sort of hot pant cutoff jean shorts. At various times, he played some pretty strange-looking instruments. And he never developed really as a very good soloist, but that was just the surface. That was like the 1 % of what he was doing. His actual guitar playing that he was laying down in the band was fundamental to how they sounded. With any true group, I mean, everybody in the band is fundamental. and his style developed very much out of Phil Lesch's also incredibly unique bass playing. But these guys were doing all kinds of stuff that was sort of contrapuntal, which is something more familiar to jazz or classical music.

15:32All right. So over the next couple of minutes here, I want to do something of a listening exercise here so we can understand what you're talking about through the music. So this is what the rhythm guitar sounded like in 1964. You can hear repeated, consistent chords that are played over and over again. It builds to a groove. This is the Beatles' hit, Can't Buy Me Love.

16:04So you can hear John Lennon there playing guitar on this song. This was before Bob Weir came along. What are we hearing exactly? Well, you're hearing John Lennon playing acoustic guitar, and it's four chords that are repeating pretty consistently. I think that's in E minor, A minor, D minor, and G. But the important thing there, like the G that it's resolving on, is a big open chord. So you're playing all six strings. And so it's a big open chord. It gives it a really nice driving sound. John Lennon was also a great rhythm guitar player in a more traditional style. And so he's creating tension and groove and variation with his right hand, his strumming hand.

16:43But his left hand, his fingering hand, is really consistently playing the same chords over and over. And so to understand how Bob Weir was different, here's The Grateful Dead, 1972 this time, performing Bertha live in Veneta, Oregon.

17:15So that's the whole band. Now what we're going to hear is an edited version of that same recording. This is just Bob Weir's guitar, and it came from the YouTube channel Yaboy Rockstar.

17:40So what's Bob Weir doing here that's so different? What he's doing there, he's not playing the open chords. He's playing on the high string, so he's not really hitting the fatter bass strings of the guitar. and he's interspersing that with little fills that are almost like lead lines. And they're very impacted by Chuck Berry. They're almost Chuck Berry style lead guitar, but he's not extending them into a solo or into what you think of as lead guitar, but it's almost a lead guitar style. Well, Weir was inspired, I know this because of your reporting, to play this way by listening to jazz piano players like McCoy Tyner, who played with the great John Coltrane.

18:32Here he is talking about Tyner with Dan Rather in 2015. Well, you know, what I heard with McCoy Tyner is he was taking a lead in his own way. He was finding direction, new direction, every time he sat down at the piano, finding new places to take the harmonic structure of the song that we're playing. And so I very quickly figured out that that's what I want to be up to. How difficult is it to do something like that, to step out and find a new direction when you're playing a pretty well-established instrument? Well, it's something that's commonly done in jazz. So a lot of the chords he played, a lot of his approaches are similar to a jazz guitar player.

19:20And he was doing something just really original. It's not so much that the execution of it is so difficult. It's that the concept of putting those chords and that approach into what began as a fairly standard rock context. And I would say the Grateful Dead went pretty far from being standard. But that was their roots. and the things we're talking about playing a lot of unique chords playing uh sort of fills instead of rhythm it could also be very busy it could get in the way of the lead guitar could get in the way of the bass it could get in the way of the keyboards there's a lot of instruments right so that's exactly why i'm wondering what kind of position that put his bandmates in how did they feel about this it's all a matter of balance and i'm sure there were points where they all got annoyed with each other like in any other band.

20:08But once they all found their roles, that's really what it's all about. And that's what being in a big group is about. That's the difference between a band and a backing band behind a singer who are playing the parts that they're told to play. This is everybody finding their role, their space, and the sum being greater than the equal of its parts. You had one line in your piece that mentioned Bob Weir had to overcome his stage fright every time he stepped into the spotlight, which I just found so remarkable after a 60-year career in music that started when he was just a teenager. And he was performing up until August of last year.

20:46How big of a loss is this for American music? Oh, my goodness. Well, I think it's incalculable in some regards, because it's not just the loss of Bob Weir. It's the end of the Grateful Dead as a performing unit in any capacity. We lost Phil Lesh just a year before Bob, and the two of them had been so out in the forefront of continuing to play this music for the last over 30 years since Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995. The reason that the music will continue forever is because one, people love it and the songs themselves are so sturdy, and two, because Bob and Phil did play with dozens or hundreds of younger musicians who they've sort of taught now the secrets of really being on the inside and how to do it.

21:36And, you know, the most obvious people, of course, are John Mayer and Othiel Burbridge and Jeff Cimenti, who were the younger members of Dead & Company. But Bob Weir was just a presence on stages for 60 plus years. And as you said, he told me that he had intense stage fright, that it never went away. which is just remarkable. Despite that, I would say Bob probably played in front of more people than anybody in the history of performance. If you calculate how large the crowds were and for how many years and how many shows he did a year, it's just astounding. Alan Paul, author and music journalist, talking to us about the life and style of Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead.

22:16His public funeral will be tomorrow in San Francisco, where the band was born. Alan, thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And again, thanks for celebrating this music.

22:41I'm glad he mentioned Bob Weir's kind of goofy energy, especially next to the other members of The Grateful Dead. The short shorts, the cowboy songs. It's funny how he ended up becoming the Dead's elder statesman in his later years. I saw Weir in his group Rat Dog and later in Dead & Co., where he was kind of a sagely presence on stage with that mane of white hair. But that's the nature of the Dead's music, speaking to new generations in different ways and bringing people together. Look no further than that musical wake expected this weekend in San Francisco and elsewhere around the country to celebrate the life and music of Bob Weir.

23:21Even with the dead's singers all gone, the band keeps playing on. Coming up next, before eating that mushroom you foraged from the forest, be sure you know what you're doing. Dozens are sick and three people dead from death cap mushrooms in California. Peter has more on that, including tips to stay safe after the break.

23:59Foragers beware. Three people have died in California and dozens more have gotten sick from eating wild mushrooms. The state health department calls it an unprecedented outbreak of illness from people accidentally picking and eating death cap mushrooms. Dr. Michael Stacey is interim health officer for Sonoma County, where one of the deaths happened. Dr. Stacey, welcome. Yeah, glad to be here. I see you've gotten a lot of rain lately and I guess lots of mushrooms in the forest. Can you tell us what happened in Sonoma County? Yeah, the conditions this year just seem to be exactly right for lots of mushrooms.

24:39So when you go out and you hike, which is something, you know, lots of people like to do in Sonoma County, you can see, you know, wild mushrooms growing along hiking trails and in the woods. And it's just more. There's more this year than in typical years. And I think people are interested more than in the past in these amazing organisms. And unfortunately, those two things together have resulted in some people picking mushrooms and eating them and having the unfortunate consequences of getting poisoned by them. Wow. Why are death cat mushrooms so dangerous? What happens in your body when you eat one?

25:19Yeah, these mushrooms are really some of the most poisonous mushrooms in the world. And they grow naturally here in Northern California. So right alongside other types of mushrooms that are edible. And they're difficult to distinguish from edible mushrooms. And when someone eats one of these death cap mushrooms, they may initially not feel anything. But, you know, in six to 24 hours, they may start to get nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. And then and then oftentimes there's a little period of time when that that seems to get better. And unfortunately, that's a false reassurance because really the the irreversible damage to the liver is happening at that point.

26:05And then, you know, in that two to four day period, people get very sick. The liver gets irreversibly damaged. Some of these cases, even if it doesn't cause death, the survivors, some of them have had to get liver transplants. It's that toxic. I'm struck by what you said, that it can be very difficult to tell the difference between a death cap mushroom and an edible mushroom. And I also see that there are folks in your state who are warning immigrants in particular that they might be at particular risk. Why would that be? I mean, it would just be, I think, you know, if these mushrooms grow here.