Education · Statewide · TX · September 4, 2026
State curriculum laws pull down Plato text, DEI words from campus syllabi
What Alinsky tactic is being used
3 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 9
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
The most striking fact in this story is that no Texas statute names Plato, yet the Symposium came out of a Texas A&M syllabus anyway. Senate Bill 37's curriculum standard is aimed at the general education core, and the 2023 DEI statute carves out course instruction, but institutions extended their scrutiny to electives and graduate courses and administrators pre-emptively told professors to strip words like 'diversity' and 'culture.' The anticipated penalty, not the written rule, is doing most of the cutting — the Chronicle's reporting on Texas is headlined precisely on universities censoring what the law does not require.
Counter-Rule 9 · Courageous Realism
Name the worst case out loud and cost it honestly. Fear of the unnamed is doing most of the work.
Read the actual text before accepting a summary: pull SB 37's enrolled version and Education Code 51.3525 from the Legislature's own site, and the A&M System policy adopted November 13, 2025. Then, when someone on campus or in your church says 'we had to remove it,' ask calmly which section requires that, and write down the answer. Name the real worst case out loud — a course needing written presidential approval — so the vague dread stops standing in for the rule.
Rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
The A&M policy did not arrive out of nowhere: reporting ties it to a student's secret recording of one professor discussing gender identity in a children's literature class, which went viral and produced backlash, a firing, a president's resignation, and then a systemwide rule. One person was picked, frozen in a clip, personalised, and made to stand for a whole institution. Dr. Peterson then became the second named face — 'the Plato professor' — with the argument conducted about him rather than about the policy.
Counter-Rule 13 · Radical Solidarity
Stand publicly with whoever has been singled out. Isolation is the whole mechanism; refusing it disarms the tactic.
Refuse the isolation mechanic in both directions. If a professor near you is named in a viral clip, do not forward the clip; ask instead for the full recording, the course syllabus, and the written charge, and say publicly that you are withholding judgment until you have them. If you think a course is genuinely wrong, make the complaint about the course in writing, by name and section number, rather than about the person on social media.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Both sides in this story have a book of rules on the table. SB 37's own general-education standard bars curriculum advocating that any race, sex, ethnicity or religious belief is inherently superior — religious belief is expressly in that list — while universities have long-published academic freedom statements they are now not honouring. A rule written to remove 'gender ideology' also removed a 2,400-year-old text that anchors the Western canon, which is the gap between stated principle and actual practice made visible.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
Hold the standard to itself, courteously and in writing: ask your institution's provost whether the same review that flagged Plato would flag a course presenting Christian sexual ethics or Genesis on male and female, and ask for the answer in writing. Before you do, close your own gap — if you want viewpoint neutrality, say so when the removed text is one you dislike, not only when it is one you value.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
Know where you stand
The free 4-minute assessment identifies your mountain and your institution’s capture phase — so alerts like this one arrive matched to where you actually stand.
Facing this yourself? Ask. Describe what is happening and get what the book, Scripture, and the law of your state say, with the exact words to use. Your first one is free.