From the immediate overreaction, it’s plain the college presidents’ message has already been muddled.
Let’s give it another shot: This week, more than 100 college presidents, some from the nation’s best-known universities, made public a project they call the Amethyst Initiative, which is designed to provoke a national debate about the drinking age.
Already, news reports say the presidents are lobbying lawmakers to lower the drinking age. Not quite.
Dr. Loren Anderson, president of Pacific Lutheran University, is the only college president in Washington to have signed the initiative.
He told KIRO radio: “I’m not among those that has concluded that changing the drinking age is what needs to be done. I am one of those who feels the issue needs to be studied, that there needs to be a national conversation about it.”
Alcohol is prohibited on the private PLU campus. But students, and Anderson, acknowledge that drinking happens anyway. He feels talking about underage drinking and alcohol abuse will help bring the problem to light, reported MyNorthwest.com.
“It is a part of society, and by pushing it underground and pretending it’s not, and ignoring the issue, we do not do our students a service,” he said.
To start the discussion, the college presidents, including those from Duke, Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins, are simply stating a truth: The 21-year-old drinking age is roundly ignored. Students drink despite the law and the colleges’ own rules. The presidents believe that the current drinking age has led to more secretive and dangerous binge drinking. In a no-win situation, strict enforcement of no-drinking rules on campus ends up sending students off-campus, the presidents say.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving, an organization that has done much good when it comes to education about its specific topic, accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of a difficult problem. It also tells parents to be wary of schools whose presidents have signed the initiative.
“Parents should think twice before sending their teens to these colleges or any others that have waved the white flag on underage and binge drinking policies,” said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.
Trying to actually talk about a problem is waving the white flag? Why not just accuse them of waving a beer bong around?
Instead of being outraged at the very idea, concerned parents, politicians and educators should clamor to make sure the discussion includes the young people we are talking about, and their non-college contemporaries.
“Just saying no” to a debate is simplistic and does nothing to address the problems raised by the college presidents.
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