Why Exonians Are Afraid of the Health Center
By SAM ALTMAN and JINMIN LEE ‘26
You wake up feeling sick — fever, chills, a runny nose. It’s Monday, your alarm is blaring, and there’s nothing you want to do less than pull yourself out of bed and go to Chemistry class. But you do anyway because you go to Phillips Exeter. You’d like to rest, but how can your material pains, however great, compare to that infinite mental strain of missing critical classes?
To help demonstrate why so many feel this way, we’ll introduce the idea of a wager by examining the famous Pascal’s Wager and then applying the format to the issue at hand.
Pascal’s Wager
Does God exist? Countless philosophers dwelled on this question: Thomas Aquinas, Augustine de Hippo, Anselm, and more. Some made religious arguments, and others made secular arguments. But how would Blaise Pascal, a mathematician who loved statistics and probability, approach this question?
After much contemplation, Pascal came up with Pascal’s Wager, a cost-benefit comparison for religious faith. Here’s how it looks:
Pascal’s Wager
Goal: Live a good life
Obstacle: You have doubts about your faith
Options: Go to church
You go to Church and be religious:
If God doesn’t exist -->life ends after death (bad)
If God exists --> eternal peace and paradise (really good)
Attend Church --> lose an hour a week (bad)
Living life according to the Bible could make you a better person (good)
Living life according to the Bible may prove to be difficult (bad)
You don’t go to Church and be religious:
If God doesn’t exist, --> life ends after death (bad)
If God exists --> go to hell (really bad)
God doesn’t exist, and you saved time in your life (good)
He concludes that the benefits of believing in God (paradise) in a world where He exists completely outweigh the harms of losing a couple of hours a week and reading the Bible.
JinMan’s Wager
If you ask Exonians on campus about their experience in the health center, it won’t take long to hear one of the many horror stories. Some recount stories from the era of Covid when they were stuffed into a room with five other sick people, unable to leave. Others have had their grades and academic momentum completely stunted after being kept down by sickness in the health center. And many more have instead suffered in silence in their classes, refusing to give in. Why, you ask, does this happen? It’s actually quite simple; thus, we present JinMan’s Wager:
JinMan’s Wager:
Goal: Save grades
Obstacle: You’re sick
Options: Go to health center or don’t go to health center
Going to the health center entails:
Guaranteed falling behind --> guaranteed grade drop
Bad grades --> guaranteed bad
Faster recovery --> guaranteed saving of health
Bad for Harkness
Not going to the health center entails:
Possibly not falling behind (can still learn some content, stay in touch with class, ask questions, etc.)
Slow and painful recovery --> guaranteed bad
Morally questionable (can infect others) --> bad
Also bad for Harkness
We ought to remind ourselves here that the base assumption is that we prioritize our grades over our health. Like it or not, this is simply the way that most Exonians operate, and “culture changes’’ are usually ineffectual and/or take a very long time. Many of you might be quick to be cynical and accuse those who have chosen against going to the health center as “compromising their and everyone else’s health”. And to some extent, even if they take precautions, they are. However, the issue is that many feel that the alternative is just as deadly. Indeed, when the goal is to save our grades, you lose JinMan’s wager by going to the health center.
Solution:
JinMan’s wager has to be changed. Exonians shouldn’t be forced to think in such binaries between physical well-being and complete academic immolation. Compromising health is destructive to long-term well-being, and relinquishing grades is also damaging to the average Exonian’s psyche. Why not help a little with both? Here’s a solution we propose.
As Exonians, we have been through the process of being sick, and, as many will attest, this is not an exaggeration. It is nearly impossible to catch up on 70 math problems, three chemistry chapters, 50 vocab words, or all three at once without immense time to do so. But the fact is, we do not have that time because Exeter doesn’t slow down for us and the assignments keep on coming. Faculty do not have enough time to be comprehensively sympathetic to our situation, nor do our classmates (at least not to the extent necessary), and, at a boarding school, there is little else anyone can do. We can’t stop an entire class’s progress to accommodate one person either. Of course, while there is some support offered in the status quo (extensions, etc.), it pales in comparison to the amount of learning you miss and work that passes you by.
Consequently, we believe that it is crucial that we give at least some agency to ailing students by making it mandatory that they be able to Zoom in to all classes they may miss, whenever possible. Students shouldn’t be forced to make contributions by connecting with Zoom but could listen in to the content like a podcast while lying in bed. Logging into class should also be optional.
Make no mistake, this is not a perfect solution, and, understandably, it may be hard to integrate such a system into certain classes, but it’s a step we must attempt. Otherwise, and absent any other changes, this culture of suffering will certainly continue unperturbed.