Readers respond to essay on teaching Plato and campus censorship

Letters to The New York Times on Feb. 1, 2026, respond to Greg Lukianoff’s Jan. 13 opinion essay about Texas’s effort to bar “officially disapproved ideas” from university classrooms. Writers who weighed in include Zhiyi Yang, Matteo Fiori, Patricia Gamon and John R. Wallach. Zhiyi Yang, a professor of Sinology at the University of Frankfurt, recalled first encountering Plato’s “Symposium” in 2003 at a seminar in China, where homosexuality had been criminalized until 1997 and remains a taboo.

He described a memorable passage about Aristophanes’s account of the origin of love and said that, while China has long had censorship and its grip has been tightening under Xi Jinping, Chinese reverence for tradition has so far protected premodern materials and driven many humanities scholars toward premodern research.

He wrote that American censors are now working with greater zealotry than their Chinese peers. Matteo Fiori of Oakhurst, Calif., wrote that Lukianoff’s essay overlooks a professor’s responsibility to mediate challenging topics without bias. He said many professors have managed classroom discussions in ways that make certain students feel the need to self-censor or risk ostracism for right-leaning or moderate opinions.

While he called the approaches taken by Texas and Florida heavy-handed, he argued that some problems stem from institutions he described as ideologically captured and not the free marketplaces of ideas Lukianoff imagined.

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