Hal's secret high: why anyone comes here at all
why would anybody who wanted to compromise his faculties chemically even come here, to E.T.A., where the whole point is to stress and stretch your faculties along multiple vectors.
Context
The administration's laissez-faire on drugs rests on an institutional creed stated in passing: "the whole point" of E.T.A. is "to stress and stretch your faculties along multiple vectors." That is the academy defining itself — a machine for maximal loading of the young body-and-mind — and reasoning that anyone who came here to dull himself would be self-selecting out. The regimen's purpose is total exertion; the discipline is assumed to police itself.