Ah, Princeton.

THERE SURFACES now at Princeton one of those peculiarly of-our-times dilemmas. Ecoutez.

A widow of Puerto Rican extraction, living in New York, has one daughter, very bright, who enters Princeton at age 16 as a freshman, to use the older terminology. The girl then moves in with a twenty-year-old Princeton undergraduate, male. The Princeton sex clinic, SECH, provides contraceptives. The mother, back in New York, has understandable trouble phoning daughter in her presumed dormitory residence.

The mother has traditional ideas about things; she pays a visit to Princeton, and the truth comes out. Mother is rebuffed by daughter.

Christmas rolls around, mother is alone since daughter is with boyfriend, and mother has by now had it up to here with Princeton. She decides that daughter will leave Princeton and live at home while attending Barnard College. To forward this idea, mother tells Princeton that she will no longer pay daughter's bills, a couple of thousand per year beyond her scholarship.

Princeton does not take this lying down, so to speak, and announces that it will pay the bills.

Without any sense of irony, a Princeton dean comments that the doctrine of in loco parentis has been dead for a long time, even as Princeton has moved to take the place of the parent in deciding how to handle the case of a minor. More extraordinarily, Princeton spokes-"persons" assert that the university would by no means pick up the bill in all cases where a parent declined to do so. The only conclusion that can be drawn from all of this is that Princeton actively chose to subsidize the behavior of this minor. Princeton, that is, chose precisely to be in loco parentis, or, as the campus joke goes, a loco parent. (Cf. "When Did Hobey Baker Die?" NR, Sept. 30, 1983). Lots and lots of legal action is in the wind. "Mistah Hobey, he dead."