Acknowledging this common behavior, 129 college presidents to date have signed a petition calling for a national discussion on lowering the drinking age to 18. Signatories include the presidents of Dartmouth and Middlebury Colleges as well as Tufts University. Three presidents from the Five College Consortium—Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Hampshire Colleges—also signed the petition, while Amherst College President Tony Marx has not.
“My view is that current law has not been effective in banning drinking by those under 21. It has simply sent drinking behind closed doors, underground and off campus, the very places most conducive to binge drinking,” said former Middlebury College President John McCardell, who wrote up the petition. “Presidents under the law are limited to the ‘abstinence’ message. And the more successful they are in enforcement, the more deeply underground the behavior goes.”
After his stint as Middlebury president, McCardell in 2007 founded the not-for-profit organization Choose Responsibility, which promotes public awareness on the consumption of alcohol by young adults. He described the petition—deemed the Amethyst Initiative—at a June 2008 meeting of the Annapolis Group of liberal arts presidents, and since then signatures have continued to come in.
The national drinking age has been 21 since 1984, when Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. The act imposed a penalty of 10 percent of a state’s federal highway appropriation on any state setting its drinking age lower than 21, effectively eliminating states’ right to set the drinking age. Twenty-four years later, a slew of College Presidents think its time to discuss the impact of the Act.
“I favor full and open and dispassionate debate about whether the 21-year-old age has worked or not,” said Smith President Carol Christ, a founding member of the initiative. “I’m not prejudging what the outcome of the discussion will be. I think that those who think the legal drinking age should be lowered believe that lowering the drinking age would bring the law more in accordance with actual behavior, and/or lessen the temptation for secret binge drinking.”
Marx said he did not sign the statement because of the negative impact lowering the drinking age could have on 18- to 21-year-olds who do not live on a residential college campus like Amherst’s.
“I do worry about student drinking, and, in particular, binge drinking, and I can imagine that a lower drinking age would help reduce this problem by allowing students to drink more socially and responsibly,” said Marx by e-mail, “But there is strong evidence that a lower drinking age would increase fatalities nationally since most 18- to 21-year-olds don’t live on a residential campus but instead drink and drive more than our students. For that reason, I was not comfortable signing a petition that might have helped us but at the expense of others … But I do think we should be talking about how we can find other ways to address this problem on campus.”
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has publicly condemned the petition, saying that colleges should do more to enforce the 21 age limit, rather than lower it. “An estimated 25,000 lives have been saved by the 21 minimum legal drinking age, which is why it is so troubling that more than 100 college and university presidents have signed on to a misguided initiative that uses deliberately misleading information to confuse the public on the effectiveness of the 21 law,” the organization said in a statement on its Web site.
The three local college presidents who signed the statement made clear that they did not necessarily endorse lowering the drinking age, but merely that it was time to discuss that option. “Lowering the drinking age to 18 is not the only alternative,” said Mt. Holyoke President Joanne Creighton. “The effect of any policy change is exactly what I think we need to explore in order to have an informed discussion. We’d like to take campus drinking out of the shadows so it can be addressed in a constructive way.”
—Rachel Cameron contributed
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