Straws in the Wind - Part 223

From Bloomberg Law: The Texas Supreme Court has ended the state’s reliance on the American Bar Association to accredit its law schools, finalizing a rule that places the state high court in charge of that certification. The court issued preliminary approval of the rule in September but continued to solicit public comments on its move through the fall. The US Federal Trade Commission weighed in with support of the change in December, calling the ABA a monopoly.

In the Jan. 6 order, the Texas Supreme Court noted that it intends to ensure that law degrees from schools in Texas are portable to other states, and vice-versa. It also doesn’t plan to impose any additional burdens on law school accreditation, it said.

...The ABA’s diversity requirements for law schools have made it a target of the Trump administration, which in February threatened to pull its accrediting power nationwide unless it ends the policies. The ABA said it would temporarily suspend enforcement of its diversity and inclusion mandate.

Full story at https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/texas-supreme-court-takes-over-law-school-accreditation-from-aba.

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From the NY Times: Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, was thunderstruck when he was told on Tuesday that he needed to excise some teachings of Plato from his syllabus. It was one way, his department head wrote in an email, that Dr. Peterson’s philosophy class could comply with new policies limiting discussion of race and gender. Days before the start of the spring semester, one of the nation’s largest public universities is racing to interpret and enforce the A&M system’s rules. Some professors are reconsidering syllabuses at the direction of administrators, or are unsure whether they will be able to lead certain classes. Course sections are being canceled or potentially reclassified, threatening students’ schedules.

...Dr. Peterson’s original syllabus called for modules focused on debates around abortion, capital punishment, economic justice, and race and gender ideology, among other topics. When Dr. Peterson, who has been at Texas A&M since 2014, submitted his syllabus for review last month, he told his department head that his “course does not ‘advocate’ any ideology.” Instead, he wrote in an email he shared with The New York Times, “I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.”

...Dr. Peterson got a response from Kristi Sweet, the philosophy program’s head. University officials had discussed his syllabus, she wrote, and the new A&M policies. Dr. Sweet gave the professor two choices. Either Dr. Peterson could “mitigate” his course’s “content to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” Dr. Sweet wrote, or Dr. Peterson could be reassigned to an ethics and engineering course.

...According to the syllabus, Dr. Peterson’s planned Plato readings included passages about Diotima’s Ladder of Love and Aristophanes’ myth involving split humans... The university asserted that Dr. Peterson added the contested coursework after the regents acted last year, but the professor insisted that he wasn’t “trying deliberately to be provocative” when he included the Plato texts...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/tamu-plato-race-gender.html.