Tag: Principia

Everything is Fine & Other Lies Principians Tell Each Other

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I recently typed up a seven page post about how Principia failed to meet and recognize the needs to students, then I had a conversation with a close friend who asked, rather pointedly, how Principia was supposed to know anything was wrong and I’m sharing this instead.

In Christian Science we are to correct our thought, if we perceive something is amiss, we are to correct our thought. If CS are perceived to be behaving in any way that is less than Perfect, it is a Failing on our part and we must work to correct it.

This applies to mental issues as well as physical ones. I’d like to think some of the issues Prin failed at would be obvious in a different school, the physical ones, the reasons people went to Cox Cottage. The reasons people snuck off campus for medical care (yes, that happened).

Mental and emotional issues are a bit harder, most of the people were “working on the situation with Science” which gave them a free pass to ignore it, or stress-read the works of MBE late into the night.

Let’s be honest, most CS are pretty good at putting on a good show. Unless something was truly horribly wrong, they showed up for classes, meals, etc. and even if they didn’t, we were all so busy with our own lives we wouldn’t have noticed unless they were our roommate, and even then, with some extreme exceptions, there were no “red flags” — and even the ones we did see we didn’t know how to act on.

If the problem was really truly bad, they’d be disappeared in the night. Disappearances during the academic term are jarring, the ones that happen between breaks are more subtle. Some people just don’t come back after Spring Break, are they on an Abroad, were they asked to leave, is it Academic Probation, did they run out of funds, did they transfer out, is it some combination of all of these?

Eventually the missing fade into the background while you try and cope with the grueling quarter system (apparently this has since been changed) and stresses of trying to maintain a good GPA so you don’t loose your sources of funding. Really, there isn’t much time for speculation.

You (quite falsely) assume everyone is a good CS and everyone is getting their stuff done, and no one is having any problems. You’re too busy working at masking your own to notice anyone else’s anyway.

Given all that, I’m almost willing to give Principia a pass, but Prin heavily emphasizes community, and morals. Principia is the sort of community where people comment if you’re not in Sunday School or you miss a House Meeting. If people can notice you’re not attending Hymn Sing, they should be able to notice if you are struggling. Or should they?

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Five Questions – Principia Edition – Kat’s Answers

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This post is being done in collaboration with my fellow ex-Christian Scientist blogger at Emerging Gently. We have also posed these same questions to other ex-Christian Scientists. Their answers appear in a series of posts on The Ex-Christian Scientist*.

1) Why did you attend Principia?

I had to get away from the toxic culture perpetuated by my high school, there were over 4000 students, and I wanted/needed a change. I had been brutally bullied through middle, felt largely overlooked (but not in a good way) in high school, and wanted a fresh start. No one else from my high school had ever gone to Principia so it seemed unlikely there would be anyone I knew, no preconceived notions about who I was, etc.

Principia was the only college I applied to, and I was fortunate to get really good funding from a variety of sources (not just loans from the college), in exchange for maintaining a 2.5-3.0 (or higher) GPA, and a yearly thank-you note.

2) Did your experiences at Principia impact/influence your views of CS?

Yes! The spectrum of what qualifies as “practicing” “Christian Science” varies wildly. The way Christian Science is put to work at Principia makes me particularly uncomfortable (see my negative experience below).

3) If you had a do-over would you attend Principia again? Why/why not? 

This is a hard one, I met my future husband at Prin — I was not looking for one, in fact I was pretty convinced I was never going to marry a “good little CS boy.” I’m happily married, and I’m unlikely to have met him another way. Would I go advise my 18-year-old self not to apply? No. I like where my life ended up, even if the path to get here was a bit trying at times.

4) Would you recommend Principia to a young CS?

No. Why not? See “related reading” at the bottom

5) Please share one positive experience and one negative experience about your time at the school/college

Positive – I made some truly wonderful friends, I enjoyed the (false) sense of security knowing I was in (what I thought was) a like-minded community, I had travel experiences I would not have had otherwise, and I learned a lot about myself (both good and bad).

Negative – this has been shared as part of a longer post before, but I will excerpt the key portion here:
Continue reading →

measles at Prin 1989 (follow-up)

From my e-mail, a follow-up corroboration of measles at Prin 1989:
That is about how I remember it, though I don’t remember a whole lot. This a really good account.
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When I was first transferred to the middle school wing, I remember they tricked me and said I’d only be there for a night. Then they didn’t let me leave and shortly afterward they decided that no one was allowed to leave their rooms there – maybe because they were mixing people with colds with people with measles and were hoping to avoid cross-contamination? It didn’t last.
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I also remember that damn clapper on the TV and how every time someone coughed it would turn off.
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Also the milkshakes. They went through the trash to see who wasn’t drinking theirs. If you didn’t have the appetite for a milkshake you were getting sicker and went to campus house.
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I remember very little about campus house. Except I can corroborate the no baths thing. I must have worn the same underwear for days. Gross.
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Oh, and remember how kids could get vaccinated so they could leave campus? Except I swear they vaccinated kids who had been in the quarantine wing and had clearly been exposed. I want to say [students name redacted] got double measles from it.
And an additional note from the original guest poster:
I suspect I only had a cold and they put me in the the measles area. Because I was fine for a long time before I got really sick… Though I could also have been in denial.

Additional information about measles and the dangers of not vaccinating

Additional information about the Principia Measles outbreaks (both 1985 and 1989)

Additional information about Christian Science and measles

1989 Measles at Principia Upper School – a first hand account

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The following guest post is a a first hand account of the 1989 measles outbreak at the Principia Upper School.

What were your experiences with CS nursing while at Prin during the measles outbreak? How did they diagnose it since they’re trained to see disease as unreal & contagion as just as unreal?

This measles epidemic hit at the beginning of my first year at Principia Upper School, in fall of 1989.  I was fifteen and it was the first time I had attended a boarding school or been away from my family. The student population was almost entirely unvaccinated due to Christian Science beliefs. The first quarter, I was paired with another sophomore named A___. She was a most unusual combination of kind, unconcerned with appearances, and popular. And she was totally into CS, or appeared to be on the outside. A tranquil understanding of the philosophy, is how I would describe it, although it sounds strange to say it that way now as ex-CS but that is how I remember perceiving her. A___ tells me “I’m not going to get sick, you’re not going to get sick”, and I was like huh? cause it really seems like we’re all getting sick but you seem so sure about it. So that kind of worked and I remember thinking, ok, of course we’re not going to get sick.

Then one Sunday after church A___ laid down and didn’t get back up, just laid there with her eyes closed, skin blotching up, listening to CS tapes. I was scared. Still nobody said anything, but frequently housemoms, the women employed by Principia to live in the dorms with us, one per wing, and act as our guardians, would walk by and look in the door at A___ without comment to either of us. Eventually a housemom came and took A___ away. The dorm got really quiet. Lots of kids came down with it the same weekend that A___ did. I’m happy to presume I felt this way for my own reasons, but I definitely felt that I was expected not to get it, in the same way I would be expected not to sneak off campus or expected not to skip my homework.

The housemoms never said “measles”, only the kids spoke of it– “some kids have measles”, “this one has it now”, “so and so’s roommate was gone when she came back from practice.” But no one in the administration talked about it. They would just tell you reassuringly that they were “taking good care of” your roommate (anyone who got spots disappeared shortly thereafter). The housemoms did not say anything about your symptoms, they would just appear at your bedside after you’d been down for the count for a few hours to a day, and they’d say ‘Come with me, honey. Is there anything you want to bring?’ There was no communication from administration otherwise.

As the epidemic started up, they put students who showed measles symptoms in Campus House, which was a separate residence on campus for students sick enough to need care from a CS nurse. That filled up quickly, with a combination of students who had measles symptoms as well as kids in there for other reasons. They were not segregated. Next, they started putting sick kids in the middle school quarters of each dorm. There were no middle school boarders at the time and those attached quarters had been locked and empty. Soon they were full.

At that point, they expanded the quarantined area to include, in each dorm, the entire wing leading to the middle school quarters. This is a couple dozen rooms per dorm we’re talking, on top of all the rest. They relocated the remaining non-afflicted students living in those wings to other, now empty, beds belonging to students who had been moved into quarantine. It was just like, ‘take your clothes and shoes and go live in this other kid’s room, we’re putting a measles-ridden student in your bed/room now.’ They had a big sheet NAILED OVER THE DOORWAY to the “quarantined” wing of the dorm. And in the girls dorm anyway, that was the wing straight in front of you when you entered– the view from the windowed housemom station, the communication hub of the dorm. It was very strange to see things in this state of affairs after growing up in a first-world country.

The campus was quarantined; no day students were allowed on campus and no boarders allowed off, but this was not enacted until the school was instructed to by authorities. There was a “quarantined” tape across the school’s front driveway/entrance and it was on the local news. We sat and watched the news until the housemoms caught us.

A day or two after A___ fell ill, they came for me. I really was shocked to have gotten sick. Nobody said anything or said I had measles, they just brought me to a room in the middle school quarters. It felt unreal. Everybody else there was sicker than me so I just made my deductions about what was coming by looking at them. Okay, looks like I’m gonna have a heavy cold, be covered in rough red bumps and lumps that itch, and have glassy eyes and stare at the wall and drink milkshakes.

God, how those women resented making us those milkshakes. You know who is the absolute Worst group of people in the entire world to have care for a bunch of sick children? Christian Scientists. They were feeding us milkshakes with raw eggs snuck into in them because they thought it was a good source of extra calories, I guess. But isn’t that a terrible idea? To feed uncooked, possibly salmonella-carrying eggs to children whose immune systems are fighting off the measles with no medical help? That seems like a terrible idea to me, I don’t know.

There was so much inexplicable conflict and tension over feeding us. For the most part, we couldn’t eat real food because the insides of our throats were coated with measles pustules and we couldn’t swallow. So like, aren’t you actually getting off the hook here because you don’t have to cook us anything? But I guess if we could’ve eaten real food they could’ve utilized the cafeteria menu and wouldn’t have had to do ANYTHING except sit around judging us for being sick. In any case, I don’t care WHAT you give me to suck on because I am half dead. If a milkshake is such a pain in the ass then just pour me a glass of milk or whatever, who cares. I don’t even want your milkshake that’s served with resentment. You’re the nut jobs who are panicking about getting enough calories into us while simultaneously pretending we’re not almost dying of measles.

It was like being cared for by twelve resentful stepparents or something. It was all local CS nurses and practitioners and local CS mothers/wives. They did almost nothing for us. We didn’t get bathed because we couldn’t stand and they never suggested that we do so with help. I think I went about eight days without bathing. They didn’t even wash our hair, mine was oily from the roots out about four inches.

There were no thermometers anywhere on campus although the sick all had raging fevers. There were no medications or medicated products of any kind offered. I would be staggering up and down the hall to the bathroom clearly in need of assistance, in full view of the kitchen where they all congregated, and they pretended not to see. The CS nurses and other helpers didn’t go down to the rooms much actually, where the sicker kids were. They hung out in the living room with the less sick and read CS literature out loud, etc. (We were not allowed to watch anything on television that was deemed a distraction from our healing process.) Observing this healthier crowd in the living room was what had given me my initial, and as it turned out, extremely optimistic perception of what having measles was going to be like. If someone started coughing uncontrollably in one of the rooms the women would look at each other knowingly and sort of roll their eyes and sigh like “what an incompetent, I guess one of has to go sit with them and read to them.” Teachers would come by and visit sometimes, which was a bright spot, and regularly I would notice a CS nurse or one of the other congregated CSers peeping in my door. But this didn’t offer much other than a sense that someone would probably notice within a few minutes if I got to where I couldn’t breathe at all or I fell or something.

The school administration “strongly encouraged” our families to use (and pay) local practitioners instead of our family practitioners, which even back then in my almost eternal naivete, I knew was a bad idea motivated by a desire to fund the local practitioners who were going to be asked to help out locally with the milkshakes and the ignoring and such. So I didn’t even have communication with my practitioner-since-birth. (Not that I really felt that attached to her, as you can imagine.) Instead I was assigned this cold local practitioner who tired of my through-the-night phone calls when I got a horrible ear infection near the end of my measles. She was like “isn’t there someone THERE who can help you?” and I was like (some shy fifteen year old’s version of) “NO of course there is no one here I can find to help me, why else do you think I would call you four times between 2 and 4 AM in panicked agony when you clearly don’t even LIKE me?”

I wish I had a photo of myself. Eyes hopelessly glued shut with pus at all times, red measles so dense and scaly they only died out around the eyes, where the skin turned deathly white. I remember thinking I looked like one of the performers in makeup for the Broadway show CATS, which was popular at the time. Like a leopard, and then the crazy-looking dirty hair sticking out in all directions around my face. But the fever-induced hallucinations were the worst. They came any time I had to do anything for myself or try to reason at all. The strongest impression I retained from the whole experience was once when I was trying to alternately walk and crawl down the hall to the bathroom and the hallway was growing in length like that scene from the end of the movie ‘Poltergeist’. I remember it as having taken about five minutes for me to progress down the hall to the bathroom. Several years later when we had middle school boarders at the school again (that started back up in fall 1991 when I was a senior) I walked down to the now-unlocked wing and was startled to realize that the room I had stayed in was only three doors down from the bathroom.

I also remember standing in the dark little dorm room and staring at myself in the mirror (though I had been instructed not to look at “the material picture”) seeing myself swaying slightly, and thinking, how can I be this sick, all of us this sick, and everyone is acting normal? They’re not even being NICE to us! And I was shocked that my parents didn’t fly out. Most other kids had at least one parent or another visit at some point. Or maybe not most, I don’t know. They did discourage parents from coming, no surprise there. My parents took the ‘out’.

So, I’ve been quarantined with the rest of the sickos for a while now, and my symptoms have greatly worsened. I haven’t breathed through my nose in days and it’s now gotten to where I can’t breathe through my mouth either because I’m literally drowning in mucus. It also happens that I have extremely chapped and cracked lips which are covered in dried blood, but I’m unaware of that because I’m delirious with fever and also because the state of my lips is very low on my priority list. To the appearance-obsessed CS crowd taking care of us, perhaps my bloody lips were the most offensive symptom I was presenting.

Anyway, in the absence of any sort of real caregiving, I determine that a great way to stay alive would be to CRAWL to the bathroom, wet a washcloth with hot water, and hold it to my mouth and breathe through it so that it would melt the mucus enough that I could cough some up and swallow some down and be able to breathe for maybe ten minutes. So I do this repeatedly, and no one seems to notice, until this one lady who I will refer to as megabitch to protect her identity and also because she was a megabitch, decides to “help”. She finds me laying under the sinks in the bathroom, takes my life-giving washcloth away, says, “honey that’s not going to help your lips” and guides me back to my room.

Well, I have no idea what has just happened. It makes no sense to me, but I am very sick and confused and I kind of realize that. There’s nothing else to do but crawl back to the bathroom again once the choking starts back up. I settle back in bed with my temporarily hot washcloth and she appears again, wordlessly snatches it away and leaves without a glance, or she would have seen me desperately trying to explain how much I needed the washcloth and what I had to go through to get it since no help was forthcoming. All this lady can see is chapped lips, she is actually pretending I am not dying of pneumonia in front of her.

The next time she flounces into my room to snatch away my washcloth (where did this vigilant oversight come from all of a sudden?) I gather my wits and make a desperate attempt to communicate with her to please not take away my washcloth and to explain to her why I need it, but the wrong words come out. My fever-addled brain is picking nonsense words. I hear them and I know they are not the words I meant to say but I can’t fix it. I start to cry. I’m so thirsty. I can’t get enough air, I haven’t for hours now. She leans down over me looking straight into my eyes with the sanctimonious perfume of CS-ery just wafting off of her, and says “You DON’T need to rely on material objects for comfort! How about some Vaseline?”

How does a reasoning person utter that sentence and not hear how completely insane it is?

When she went for my washcloth this time, I clung to it and kicked her right in the shins. That’s why you shouldn’t deny fever-reducing drugs to fifteen year olds (or anyone.) I was so delirious. I felt I was fighting for my life. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I actually was fighting for my life. But I was an obedient and easily intimidated kid, and I had never behaved like that with an authority figure.

The absolute nadir of my measles adventure came a few days later. I had been staying in the same room in the middle school quarters from the time I was originally removed from my normal assigned dorm room. I got sick near the height of the epidemic; the last to get sick were in the makeshift dorm wings. As the first to get sick (mostly at Campus House and a few in the middle school quarter) began to recover, Prin was hot hot hot to get those makeshift sick wings returned to normal dormitory use (the ones with the sheets hanging in the archways) because there’s absolutely no way that was kosher in terms of meeting the conditions of the quarantine. With that in mind, they divided us up into either Very Sick or Almost Dying so that they could move the Almost Dying kids over to Campus House where they’d be in a separate building that was actually intended for caring for sick students, and they could then consolidate the Very Sick kids all back into the Middle School quarters of each dorm, where there was an actual door they could lock and put the quarantine sign on. So it’s not that this was a bad idea.

They tell me to get my stuff together and they are going to drive me over to Campus House. Folks, I do not know why this was my breaking point but it was. I mean this fever I had was FANTASTIC, unquestionably it was in the 103-106* range because I was hallucinating and convulsing, and it had gone on for days with no medication or hydration. Anyway, I lost my damn mind. I cried hysterically. I refused to go to Campus House. “I’m getting better! I’m fine! I feel great!” I had absolutely no voice, of course, okay? Not even a whisper. Nothing. Just the horrible, wet, racking cough punctuating everything.

I break away from my caregivers’ grasp, lock myself in the nurse’s station and begin desperately calling each of my parents in turn, collect, because I think that I can tell my parents to tell Prin not to move me to Campus House. Number one, the operator cannot hear me. It takes several attempts before I successfully communicate with one. But even when the operator puts a call goes through, my parents can’t hear me either and hang up. Start over. Try other parent. Same problem. Through all this there is a crowd of CS nurses & housemoms knocking on the door trying to reason with me. High drama. Finally I luck out with a compassionate (and especially acute-of-hearing) phone operator who attempts to slightly explain the phone call, and Mom figures it out. “Elizabeth?? Is that you??” and she lets me freak out for a while, and then convinces me to go to Campus House. So I did.

The first exchange I had upon arriving at Campus House was with a certain CS Teacher (CSB’s) wife who was helping out during the epidemic. She asked me if I “should really be eating that Popsicle, dear?” I was overweight, and so shocked at her remark that I did not have the presence of mind to point out that 1. none of you are tracking or communicating to each other what any of us are eating, so really? Really, lady? and 2. I have measles IN MY THROAT. That’s how much measles I have. ALL I’ve eaten for the last ten days is popsicles and milkshakes! And nothing. Mostly nothing. Also, surely you’re not suggesting that these material popsicles can influence my weight? Because if you ARE suggesting that, then this entire measles epidemic is a complete hypocrisy! I mean, you’d basically be torturing children under a bullsh*t premise! Hahahahah!!! Crazy!

In closing, and although it is also a compliment I actually say this to emphasize how horribly the measles thing was handled, I loved Prin. I had a great time, I have lots of fond memories, and other than this instance and a few other WTF conversational exchanges with administration, I have no complaints, so this is not a “Prin sucked” thing. This is someone who had a largely positive Prin experience saying that the measles epidemic was a fiasco, and that CSers actually have no business caring for the very ill (and particularly the underaged) unless they are there only for spiritual support and are working in conjunction with actual nurses who know what the hell they are doing and how to treat the sick with a modicum of compassion. Prin mismanaged it, and the CS nursing staff & local support team mistreated and neglected us. Really badly.

My roommate A___ made it through the measles epidemic but died shortly after graduation. She came down with a respiratory illness while she was studying in Europe, and she didn’t go to the doctor. Her flatmates found her unresponsive and brought her in, and she died in the hospital. I’ve pondered this over the years because many of us had lasting effects from the measles. I have somewhat chronic strep throat due to scarring in my throat from the measles. Several of my friends reported that they had chronic chest coughs well into their college years (4-6 years on).

Elizabeth was a 4th generation Christian Scientist and attended Principia Upper School for three years. She boarded on the Upper School campus during the 1989 outbreak.

To contact Elizabeth, please e-mail excsmemoir (at) gmail (dot) com, subject: “Elizabeth’s measles story”

Edited 2/3/2015 to protect privacy and fix a few typos.

follow up: hazing at Principia

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 

Three charged in Principia football hazing case

TOWN AND COUNTRY • The investigation into hazing allegations at a sports camp at Principia Upper School last summer has led to felony charges for two teens, and misdemeanor counts against another.

Read the entire article: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/three-charged-in-principia-football-hazing-case/article_2a28e65d-c4ed-5c53-a255-a70e1a14f92f.html

Previous post on the topic: https://kindism.org/2014/09/04/what-ive-been-reading-hazing/

Equality at Prin, Vague Repression for All!

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This is a follow up on https://kindism.org/2014/11/18/new-policies-on-homosexuality-at-principia-college/  If anyone would like to share an extended piece about their thoughts about, or experiences with Principia’s policies (beyond a brief comment), please be in touch! I welcome guest posts!

The TL;DR version Gays can now openly attend Principia, and the Administration has shifted their focus to combat the very vague threat of sensuality. What does that mean? Equal opportunity oppression for all!

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 6.07.52 PMGood news for the dozens (maybe hundreds) of Christian Scientists and Principia alumni, the Principia Board of Trustees has FINALLY decided that

All students, faculty, and staff shall be perceived, welcomed, loved, and supported as spiritual ideas. They are expected to honor the community standards of moral and spiritual purity in relationships.

In terms of practices at Principia regarding admissions, community standards for living in the Principia community, and employment at Principia, we are directing the administration to establish consistent rules and regulations for students, faculty, and staff, regardless of sexual orientation. (emphasis mine)

So people who are gay can attend Principia. Alumni donors who were holding out because of draconian, repressive policies about homosexuality can now freely give with a somewhat clear conscious (the policies are still repressive and draconian, but now they theoretically apply to everyone more equally). Some people feel this is too little, too late, and that the Trustees should apologize for their past discriminatory actions, but as that seems unlikely to happen.

It seems unlikely Principia cares what I think — I’m no longer a Christian Scientist and I was never a major financial donor (I paid off my loans and was done contributing), but here are my thoughts on this mess.

Principia, you’re not serving the cause of anything but yourself. You are using Christian Science to oppress, repress, manipulate and thoroughly wreck hundreds of students lives. Christian Science does not need your help with this, it does a perfectly good job of that on it’s own, if anything you take the warped aspects of the religion to new and terrifying levels. I provide now a few excerpts from the Trustee-provided Question and Answer page:

  • Principia continually encourages the members of the community to turn to our Pastor, the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, for a deeper and more spiritual understanding of all aspects of life, including love, identity, and relationships.

Those are the last books you should be turning to for relationship advice. The teachings of Science and Health are detrimental to healthy relationships, both with one’s self, and others. The idea that that turning to the material body for pleasure only results in pain, and that sex should be reserved for procreation only (and only when you’re married, if you really must), really fucks up people’s ideas about what should and shouldn’t be happening in a relationship. Instead of offering positive messages about sex and teaching about consent, anything remotely sexual (or “sensual” as Principia prefers to call it) is shamed, shunned, vilified, and Must Be Avoided.

  • What is Principia doing to address sensuality?
    Principia remains dedicated to removing the intrusion and distraction of sensuality within our community.

So we’ve moved from discriminating against homosexuality to “addressing” sensuality. Apparently it is a distracting intrusion. Just so we’re all clear on what the problem is, I’ve included a screen shot of what Google has defined sensuality as, it is worth noting sensuality was most popularly used in the early 1800s, my how far Prin has come.

Webster’s lists Sensuality’s antonyms as “abstinence, asceticism, sobriety, temperance.” I’d say this is a bit heavy and open vague interpretation by the Thought Police.

What is wrong with sensuality? It distracts from one’s relationship with God, reminding them that they’re mortal, and that opens them to the Christian Science Trinity of Doom: Sin, Disease and Death.

  • We will continue to focus on spirituality and true self-worth while maintaining our commitment to engage the community on issues such as pornography and sexual relations outside of marriage. We invite your support to lift thought to a higher view of God’s man.

“True self-worth” oh please. I knew many women (myself included) longing to feel “content” because we were lacking a boyfriend. We would read, and re-read the Chapter on Marriage, which has “wonderful thoughts” on how you must be “whole” before you enter into a relationship. How do you become whole? By aligning your thoughts more closely with God and immersing yourself in the Books. This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, because you’re clearly never going to be whole enough, and you feel ashamed that you’re failing at it. You’re never going to ascend, you’re never going to align your thought closely enough with God, you will eventually fall prey to malicious animal magnetism, and the unholy trinity of doom. Christian Science is lousy at true self-worth.

If you choose to watch porn, please make sure it is ethically sourced (and if you’re in a relationship, don’t lie to your partner about it. If you don’t like porn, don’t watch it). Sexual relations out side of marriage? What does that matter to Principia? As an adult of legal consenting age, who I choose to have sex with, and when I chose to have sex with them is NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS.

Many of the problems with sex and relationships comes from a lack of open communication between partners, and to some extent, community support. Creating a culture where sex is shamed, feared, to even be discussed is unhealthy and damaging. The Defeating Dragons blog has many, many excellent posts about this, the Prin Trustees could learn a lot from it.

  • How does this directive affect public displays of affection?
    Every Principian is subject to Principia Policy 22’s requirement for good social conduct. Specific standards will be developed by the administration in order to provide consistent rules and regulations.

I looked up Policy 22 on page 236 of Education at Principia, on p. 236 it states

All activities taking place on the campus or within the school or college community, whether they occur as part of the organized work or as extracurricular phases of the school or college life, shall be permitted to exist only to the extent they are consistent with the purpose and policies of The Principia.

Maybe I got the wrong policy, or maybe the Trustees just pulled something out of Ed at Prin. It is worth noting Policy 22 is also cited on an old admissions check-list stating

A student may be considered for suspension for any behavior deemed “loose social conduct”(Policy 22 of Purpose and Policies of The Principia, pp. 227–236, in Education at The Principia). A pattern of disregard for lesser school rules could also result in disciplinary suspension.

Policy 22 is nice and vague. It can be read just about any way the Office of Student Life, or the Board of Trustees wants. It can apply to just about every situation, and I’m fairly sure I wasn’t even aware of what the policy was until I looked it up, which leaves me wondering if the average Principia student has any idea of what they’ve really signed up for — my guess is probably not.

  • We expect all public actions to be considerate of others. The expectation of pure, genuine, and respectful displays of affection will apply equally to all community members. (emphasis mine)

What exactly qualifies as “pure, genuine, and respectful displays of affection”? Who decides? At the college, they are adults of legal consenting age, who cares if they choose to hold hands or kiss in the Concourse? What business is it of anyone’s other than their own? Really, at the end of the day, WHO CARES!?

Clearly someone at Principia cares, someone narrow minded and puritanical, someone who wants to police thoughts to make sure they’re pure and their motives are right. After all, it only takes a little bit of malicious animal magnetism (as unreal as it may be) to ruin everything. All it takes is a single thought out of line with God and everything is ruined. Error will simply overwhelm and they’ll fall victim to the Christian Science Trinity of Doom: Sin, Disease and Death.

And now I have a few questions for the Trustees, and I’m sure I’ll have more when they release more Q&A sheets:

  • Why does Principia feel the need to concern itself with the personal lives of students? — I understand there are legal issues with underage boarders at the Upper School, so some involvement is necessary (I have other problems with this), but at the College?
  • Why does Principia feel the need to know a student’s sexual orientation?
  • How is someone’s sexual orientation determined?
  • Why does any of this matter to the Principia? Why are they so hung up on sex?
  • What is Principia afraid of?

Principia has decided to stop discriminating against homosexuals, and while they should be applauded for that, I strongly suspect they will arbitrarily enforce these policies, causing heartache and misery for dozens of students.

I have heard the argument that people choose to attend Principia. They choose to pay upwards of  $37k a year for their educations. No one has to remain at Principia, there are many, many other colleges out there, most of which have more progressive policies. On one hand, Principia’s policies are draconian and oppressive, on the other, you can choose not to attend.

  • This argument is lovely, but it ignores naive high school students who really do think they can abide by the Principia Code of Conduct (or think it won’t actually be as restrictive as it is). People also attend Principia because their parents/grandparents/relatives went, because it is the only Christian Science college in the world, and to some people (see naive high schooler comment) that makes a difference.
  • No one has to remain at Principia, is a similarly lovely argument, during my time there we were on a quarter system (that was later changed over to semesters after I left), most schools are on the semester system, so transferring credits was a nightmare. I know several people who spent far longer than 4-6 years in college because they needed to make up extra credits that never transferred properly from Prin. I also know people who never got their transcripts properly forwarded to their new colleges/universities which made transferring credits rather difficult. Prin also refused to release the transcripts of at least one person because they were “behind” on their student debt — being enrolled as a student elsewhere would’ve enabled them to put off payment of loans.

It may be too late for those of us who did attend and were hurt by those policies, and I hope that Principia continues to strive to do better, because let’s face it, they have a long way to go.

At the college they may “all be adults” but they’re also “adults” who have chosen to live by a highly regulated set of “moral” guidelines — and they can be “requested” to leave if they fail to abide by them. The vague, open-ended nature of the Questions and Answers leaves me wondering if instead of granting homosexual students rights, instead they are going to simply oppress all students further.

Congratulations Prin, you’ve joined the 21st century and are allowing homosexuals the right to be just as oppressed as everyone else at Prin. Now can you alter your fundamentally flawed stance on medicine? Or would that not serve the Cause?