Recently, the first-year orientation process, in particular the shows The Inside Scoop and E Pluribus Gustavus, have been receiving intense public scrutiny. So as far as I can tell, the cause can be linked back to a socially-conservative blog post made by a senior Gustavus student who wrote about those shows using video clips he captured while viewing the performances. The videos are not raw footage, but have been edited down to reflect only specific scenes, or even parts of scenes, and were taken and edited without consent.

As far as any blog post has ever gone “viral” from the Gustavus community, this particular one has made it onto national conservative and liberal interest websites and has spawned various reactions from YouTube and letters to the Editor here in The Gustavian Weekly. I know the President’s office has been inundated with alumni and current parents who were confused and angered by this blog, and many other people and institutions on campus have felt this rush as well.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not only part of the E Pluribus cast and show (and have been all my years here), but a short clip of a skit I performed was included among the blog videos. In other words, I have some stake in this now, campus,—and nation-wide debate over what gets displayed during orientation.

Without discussing the “ethics,” or lack thereof, in the creation and formulation of the progenitor blog post, I want to focus more on what the especially controversial E Pluribus Gustavus show actually looks like and the reasons why we’d ever choose to bring up issues like sexuality (or sexual assault, or hate speech, or eating disorders, or domestic violence, or religion) to the incoming class.

E Pluribus Gustavus is like no other show you have seen. There are no acts, no sound or lighting effects, no set and no costumes. As it’s formulated, the show focuses on the actor-created material, which brings into exceptional focus the particular social justice issues we present. We the actors create the show from scratch  the week before the first-years see the final 40-minute show. Yes, that’s 40 minutes, not just six minutes of absurdity and propaganda smashed together, like some videos may have led you to believe.

But I digress. We create the show to highlight social justice issues and our relation to them as Gustavus students. That we are Gustavus students is important for the first-year students to know, but that we are Gustavus students does not mean that the social justice issues we talk about are exclusive to this campus, and for that matter, are not repeated on every ground students occupy in the nation.

We choose to present through the theater things that we encounter that are not often talked about. This can be very serious, like when an actor will recount her experience of being sexually assaulted, or can be really funny, like when an actor will explain what he thought his roommate might think of him when his roommate found out he’s from Jamaica (making Gustavus the number one college in Minnesota for Bobsled!).

This kind of theater is very open—we talk about a huge array of social issues in our limited time—but is intentionally structured to simply present the questions without answers. We structure the show so that the audience isn’t left with a checklist of how they are supposed to act but with their eyes widened to new possibilities and new approaches. Our goal is not to brainwash the first-year class into a liberal pro-gay, pro-sex, anti-Christian agenda (as we’ve been accused), but to lay the foundations for talking about social issues.

To the extent to which our actions have led people to question what it means to be Christian and what it means to talk about important social issues in a greater context, I suppose then I can only be proud of the work we E Pluribus actors have done. If there was one thing that truly frustrates me about why the orientation process has come under so much criticism, it is that people are making their judgments based not on the shows themselves, or even the opinions from first-year students or people involved in the process including the Peer Assistants and Gustie Greeters, but rather stand behind the biased distortion formulated on a blog devoted to arousing hatred and intolerance.

As much as it hurts me to hear that people think my love and beliefs are not Christian or ‘right,’ I’d rather fight for a broader understanding of our social community and justice rather than dwell on insults people may think twice about if they had been encountered E Pluribus from a more truthful perspective.

Gustavus is one of the few institutions in the nation with the courage to present issues of social justice to their incoming class of students. If you grant that every student is a person who deserves to be treated like one, then you have to assume that each student will encounter issues of social justice in their formative years, no matter how much sheltering a parent or institution could impose.

By including E Pluribus Gustavus in first-year orientation, we grant the incoming class the lucky fortune of being exposed to social issues before they encounter them personally, so that they do not feel alone or blind when they encounter actions on this campus that confuse, frustrate or hurt them on this campus—because if our students are learning, they will.