I don’t know if I support them, but I can understand where a few dozen college presidents are coming from when they say the age at which one can legally drink alcoholic beverages ought to be reduced.
I remember my time in college two decades ago as a period where the attitude was constantly pushed that part of the “college experience” included getting overserved with cheap beer coming straight from the keg.
WHILE I DON’T hang around college campuses much anymore (being around 18-year-olds these days is creepy, it almost feels like stalking), I doubt much has changed in the mentality of the student bodies that are gathering on campuses across the state and nation this month for yet another year of academia at work.
The parties that make up a part of the college experience are going to include alcohol for those students old enough to consume it, and those students really aren’t going to care much if some kid who’s only a year or two underage doesn’t have enough sense to know when to stop drinking.
About 100 college presidents are part of an effort to urge state Legislatures to reduce the drinking age to 18, saying the mentality of campus life is such that they just can’t stop these kids from drinking.
They would prefer it if student activity were no longer illegal. That would make a large part of their problem go away, and allow them to treat over-consumption of alcohol as more of a public health issue.
NOW KEEP IN mind that I went to a slightly offbeat college campus with regards to the alcohol issue. My alma mater actually banned possession of alcohol on campus, even if you were legally old enough to drink.
Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington felt that it was easier to enforce the laws setting the legal drinking age at 21 by not letting anybody have alcohol – after all, it was an illegal substance for most of the student body. But it’s not like IWU was Wheaton College, where students sign pledges to abstain from alcohol (among other substances and activities) entirely in their lives.
Yet a strict “alcohol policy” didn’t stop us from feeling “the need” to get bombed. It didn’t make it impossible to get liquor. In fact, all it really seemed to do was create the perception that alcohol was somehow a desired commodity, rather than just some cheap, nasty-tasting swill (which is what most of the liquor we consumed back then really was).
At other college campuses where there were no such rules (such as Illinois State University in neighboring Normal), the alcoholic atmosphere seemed like a free for all. I can remember being surrounded by the tavern ads encouraging us to come on by for weekend drink specials and other events meant to make life in a central Illinois college town seem a little more feisty.
I ALWAYS CHUCKLED at the “rules” that were in force at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where people had to be at least 21 to legally order a drink at the taverns that catered to campus life, but only had to be 19 to enter. So a 21-year-old guy could bring his 19-year-old girlfriend to the bar for a “date.” If somebody looked the other way and she got “served” by mistake, oh well.
I even remember the protests of 1984 on the ISU campus, where students upset that police were enforcing the drinking age laws marched through the downtown area and committed tens of thousands of dollars in vandalism. They “rampaged” through Normal, Ill., for beer.
There's also the fact that I had my first "legal" drink of alcohol some three days before I turned 21. I happened to be in the District of Columbia, where at the time the legal drinking age remained 18. So my first drink was the ultimate non-event.
What is worth mentioning of my college “experience” is that it is not at all out of the ordinary. And apparently, it really hasn’t changed much to this day.
THAT IS WHAT is behind the Amethyst Initiative, the effort by presidents from colleges as diverse as Dartmouth and Ohio State to accept what they see as “reality” and lower the drinking age.
They note it was at 18 or 19 (depending the particular state) for so many years, and they doubt that the safety of the general public has seriously been increased by raising the age to 21.
Call it surrender, or an acknowledgement of reality.
They just want to accept that students are going to drink alcohol. They’d like to think that removing the taint of scandal that now exists for 18-year-olds to get drunk would make them less likely to drink too much because it would not be some “big deal.”
THEY EVEN CITE studies showing that binge drinking is connected to some 500,000 injuries and 1,700 deaths of college students per year. It could be true. I remember the one significant student fatality that took place in Bloomington-Normal, Ill., when I was a student was an ISU student who was hit by a train when his foot got caught in the rails – in large part because he was inebriated.
It’s not like having rules against alcohol consumption stopped any of this drinking from taking place. Perhaps it is time to consider that the higher drinking age is as successful at stopping 18-year-olds from drinking as prohibition was from preventing the population at large from getting ahold of bootleg beer.
Like I said before, I went to a college that tried banning alcohol on campus (even though it was permitted back when the drinking age in Illinois was lower). That didn’t stop us from getting our hands on beer kegs or other stuff.
It didn’t stop me from having a couple of embarrassing moments that people who remember me from college always go out of their way to remind me of when I (too infrequently) see them.
AND I MUST confess, the one time during my four years of college that I got into sufficient trouble to have to see the Dean of Students was for a violation of the university alcohol policy, where I got the equivalent of the lecture Dean Wormer gave to Kent Dorfman in the film “Animal House.”
You remember, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
I can’t help but wonder how many teenagers would be willing to take such advice, if liquor weren’t given such a “glamorous” image on campus.
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EDITOR’S NOTES: University officials across the country are starting to wonder if a legal drinking age of 21 (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-college-drinkingaug19,0,7039288.story) is realistic.
Not all academics feel this way. Officials (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-bradleypresident-,0,6477952.story) at Bradley University in Peoria want the drinking age in Illinois to remain at 21.
The one fact that all sides of this issue ought to agree on is that the “status quo” is (http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/) unacceptable.
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