Taking On 21

A former college president starts a national campaign to lower the drinking age

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Colloguy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with John M. McCardell Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College, about his proposal to lower the national drinking age to 18.

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By PAULA WASLEY

Denver

John M. McCardell Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College, is a respected Civil War scholar. His lectures on the Gettysburg Address command large audiences at alumni meetings, and his seminars on the war always attract eager undergraduates.

Recently the genteel academic threw himself into another conflict. Call it the Battle of the Binge.

Mr. McCardell believes that underage drinking is one of the most pernicious problems on college campuses. He also believes that lowering the drinking age to 18 would significantly reduce the harmful effects of alcohol consumption among students. In January he founded Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit group that seeks to start a grass-roots movement to change drinking-age laws.

He proposes giving "drinking licenses" to 18- to 20-year-olds who complete an alcohol-education program, which he compares to driver-education classes. Such a plan, he says, would allow parents and educators to become role models for responsible drinking and to educate young people about the effects of alcohol. If teenagers who violated drinking laws forfeited their eligibility for the drinking license, he says, it would create a strong incentive for them to abide by the law.

On a March evening, Mr. McCardell is here in Denver to charm potential donors, sway university administrators, and court student leaders. It is his first stop on a national tour, an effort he hopes will prompt "an informed and dispassionate conversation" about underage drinking.

At a private reception with local business and community leaders, he compares his nascent campaign with Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg. Lincoln, he says, described the war as a test of the proposition that all men are created equal. Mr. McCardell wants to test his own proposition that, after 22 years, the current legal minimum drinking age has had a host of unintended consequences.

"Most of those effects have been negative," he says. "We have come here to test the degree to which folks like you feel strongly, as I do, that the law needs to be changed."

Reactions to Mr. McCardell's message vary. Some observers describe his venture as brave. Others call it quixotic. His opponents say it's downright dangerous.

Reconsidering the Law

During his 13 years as president of Middlebury, Mr. McCardell dealt with his share of campus alcohol problems: Students who drank themselves sick. Pressure from the town to crack down on off-campus partying. Complaints from parents who said the college's alcohol code punished students too severely for participating in the rites of young adulthood.

Mr. McCardell came to resent the drinking-age law, which he believes fosters a culture of surreptitious, high-risk drinking and forces administrators to choose between policing their students and looking the other way.

He also believes that behind the closed doors of dormitory rooms and fraternities, a few drinks are likely to turn into several, increasing the odds of alcohol-related death and injury, assault, date rape, and vandalism. "Legal-age 21," he says, "creates a situation where the risks are increased and the ability of any of us to manage those risks is put into jeopardy."

While he was president, Mr. McCardell kept those views to himself. But two months after retiring, in 2004, he published an opinion column in The New York Times denouncing the drinking age as "bad social policy and terrible law." The piece caught the eye of Julian Robertson, founder of the Robertson Foundation, a philanthropic organization, which gave Mr. McCardell a $50,000 grant to study the effects of the law.

A year's worth of research confirmed Mr. McCardell's suspicions, he says. He challenges the conventional wisdom about the drinking law's positive effects. For instance, proponents of the law credit it with saving lives, citing statistics showing that the number of drunk-driving fatalities has decreased during the last two decades.

But Mr. McCardell says that conclusion ignores other changes that occurred during that period, including advances in seat-belt and airbag safety, stricter drunken-driving laws, and a sustained public-information campaign about the dangers of driving after drinking. "If we're going to talk about cause and effect," he says, "we can't be selective in determining cause-and-effect relationships."

If anything, he says, the drinking age has only postponed the problem of drunken driving, since the greatest number of alcohol-related car crashes occur among 21-year-olds. "Seat belts have saved more lives in two years than legal-age 21 has saved in 22 years," he says.

Researchers have overlooked the fact that the current drinking age has led to more reckless underage drinking, Mr. McCardell argues. "Binge drinking is a problem that didn't exist 21 years ago," he says, citing studies showing that while fewer college students drink today than a decade ago, those who do are drinking excessively, with sometimes fatal consequences.

According to data collected by Henry Wechsler, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health who studies the drinking habits of college students, the number of 18- to 20-year-olds who have been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning has increased significantly in the past 10 years. Other surveys indicate that nearly half of college students who drink say they do so to get drunk.

"There are parents who have lost a child to alcohol-related incidents that have nothing to do with drunk driving," Mr. McCardell says, "and everything to do with environments created on college campuses by legal-age 21."

Mr. McCardell is taking on a law that owes much to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The Texas-based organization has an annual budget of $53-million and considerable political clout.

Until the 1980s, states had varying minimum legal drinking ages. During the Vietnam War, more than half of the states allowed people to drink at 18, 19, or 20. In 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, declaring that states with drinking ages lower than 21 would forfeit 10 percent of their federal highway funds. One by one the states complied — the result, in part, of MADD's lobbying efforts — and the debate over the drinking age fell silent.

The organization's leaders see no reason to break that silence. Charles A. Hurley, MADD's chief executive officer, calls Mr. McCardell's proposition a "cavalier recommendation ... guided more by philosophy than science."

He faults Mr. McCardell's interpretation of federal drunken-driving statistics. Analyzed correctly, Mr. Hurley says, those numbers prove that the drinking-age law saves 1,000 lives a year. "This isn't fundamentally an issue of opinion," he says. "It is literally a matter of life and death."

Mr. Hurley agrees with Mr. McCardell that heavy drinking is a serious problem on campuses but says there are no data to suggest that lowering the legal age would alleviate it. "The fact is, legal-age 21 is working better in blue-collar America than in Ivy League America," he says.

Support From Researchers

Mr. McCardell is also treading in the domain of several prominent health researchers who support stricter enforcement of the age-21 law.

William DeJong, a professor at Boston University's School of Public Health and a former director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention, in Newton, Mass., worries that lowering the drinking age would increase high-school students' access to alcohol and displace the problems of underage drinking to a younger and even more vulnerable population. He accuses Mr. McCardell of cherry-picking research that supports his view.

For example, he says, Mr. McCardell has overlooked data showing an increase in drunken-driving deaths in states where the drinking age was lowered in the 1970s.

"Age-21 law is the most defensible public-health policy we have when it comes to dealing with youth alcohol problems," Mr. DeJong says. "To strip away that effective policy and replace it with an education program that research suggests won't succeed is just dangerous."

Mixed Reviews

Mr. McCardell's biggest opponent may be apathy. In the decades since the minimum drinking age was enacted, the American public has accepted it as the status quo.

"I don't see that there's a public outcry to change the age back, and therefore the likeliness of it is slim," says Drew Hunter, executive director of the Bacchus and Gamma Peer Education Network, a national association of college health educators. He believes that Mr. McCardell would be better off working within the framework of the current law to reduce harm on campuses through programs like peer education.

Underage students — most of whom get alcohol from older friends or with fake ID's — have little reason to challenge the current law.

"Students will drink alcohol regardless," says Brandon E. Collins, a 20-year-old junior at St. John's University, in New York, and a peer educator for Bacchus. "It doesn't matter what the age is."

He thinks lowering the drinking age is a bad idea. Recalling that his freshman-year roommate was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, he says students already get themselves into enough trouble with alcohol, regardless of their age. Lowering the drinking age, he believes, would cause more recklessness and mayhem on campuses.

Jack R. Gilles, a junior at the University of Colorado at Boulder, favors changing the law, provided that teenagers receive a better education about the risks of alcohol use. Three years ago, Mr. Gilles rushed a fraternity with a friend and neighbor, Gordie Bailie. The morning after their initiation, Mr. Bailie was found dead of alcohol poisoning. Now Mr. Gilles heads a Boulder group that teaches college and high-school students about the warning signs of alcohol poisoning.

The penalties associated with underage drinking dissuade many students from getting help if they see their friends in trouble, Mr. Gilles argues. Lowering the drinking age, he says, would allow for more safety controls, such as requiring bars and fraternities to have someone present who is trained to handle alcohol-related health emergencies.

"When drinking is done illegally or underground, that potential does not exist," he says. "The best you can hope for now is that somebody happens to be there who knows what they're talking about."

'They Don't Listen to Me'

Mr. McCardell believes he can sway administrators who are on the front lines of campus drinking issues.

He already has the vote of J. Lee Peters, vice president for student affairs at the University of Hartford. Mr. Peters says the current law undermines his relationship with students by forcing him to spend time catching and punishing underage drinkers instead of educating them about responsible alcohol use. If the drinking age were lower, he says, he could focus on bad behavior associated with drinking, rather than on the drinking itself.

As the enforcer of what students consider an unfair law, "I become an illegitimate resource, and they don't listen to me when I tell them they shouldn't binge drink or you shouldn't have more than one or two drinks per hour," he says. "The law actually gets in the way of us trying to teach them something."

Robert N. Maust, a student-affairs coordinator at Boulder, agrees that a lowered drinking age, if phased in slowly, might make interactions between students and administrators less adversarial.

But such a change would also increase colleges' responsibility to ensure that students drink in safe and supervised environments, he warns. "If we do not help give direction to new policies and laws and just hope that people understand and abide by them, the culture still takes over ..." he says. "Making sure there are education and incentives and disincentives to go along with the whole plan is exactly the right way to go."

Mr. McCardell says he is prepared to submit his proposition to public scrutiny. In the coming months, he hopes to challenge the notion that cracking down harder on underage drinking is a sound policy for colleges.

"It is naïve to believe that 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds are not going to drink," he says. "The question before us isn't do they or don't they drink, should they or shouldn't they, but how to make it the safest environment for these young people."