GAMBIER — Chancellors and presidents of colleges and universities across the United States have formed what is called the Amethyst Initiative, an organization of educators concerned about the drunkenness and alcohol-related reckless decisions made by many students.
The initiative calls for informed debate about the 21-year-old drinking age, asks elected officials to weigh the consequences of current alcohol policies and invites new ideas on how to best prepare young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol use.
The formal declaration signed by the higher education officials states that it is time to rethink the legal drinking age, which was established as age 21 by Congress in 1984. The signatories believe the current policy is not working, but, in fact, has led to the rise of dangerous, clandestine “binge drinking” upon the part of too many college and university students. They say “adults under 21 are considered capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.”
Kenyon College president S. Georgia Nugent is one of the more than 100 individuals who have joined the initiative. Although always cognizant of the culture of underage drinking on campus and the dangers of binge drinking, Nugent faced a particularly grim reminder in April 2005. A first-year Kenyon student, Colin Boyarski, was found dead in a Gambier field on April 2 in an apparent alcohol-related fatal incident.
At the time, Nugent told the News that widespread binge drinking began to surface on college campuses in the late 1980s and early ’90s. This was just around the time states began to raise the drinking age to 21 under pressure from the federal government, which threatened to revoke highway funding if states did not comply.
“I believe there is a causal relationship there,” she said in 2005, and she maintains that sentiment today. “The absolute No. 1 reason why I and all of my fellow presidents are concerned about this is because we are concerned about the safety of our students. We’re seriously skeptical about whether the 21-year-old law has increased their safety. Many of us remain concerned that may have a causal relationship to binge drinking.
“I believe Colin’s death was a direct result of this kind of sequestered binge drinking,” Nugent said on Wednesday. “If anything, it really strengthened my sense that we really need to intervene in some way to try to mitigate this behavior.”
She said Kenyon has been even more active since that time in trying to do more and more to protect the students, and to develop programs that will avoid the binge-drinking problems.
Nugent said college and university presidents get together in various professional organizations, and maintained that she has never met a college president, including those who are presidents on so-called dry campuses, who does not say that binge drinking is a problem.
Asked why some people are opposed to an open discussion about the drinking problem on campuses, Nugent said it is an emotionally charged issue.
“Obviously some people who have deep concerns about this issue have suffered tragedies in their families,” she said. “Emotions may be shutting down the desire for debate. ... Some people have said, ‘just crack down.’ Well, it turns out that’s probably not very effective, but one can understand how some people feel that’s a simple answer.”
Nugent takes exception to allegations that college presidents are merely using the Amethyst Initiative to avoid dealing with drinking on campus. She said she and the others truly feel responsible for their students’ lives.
“It is absolutely false that presidents have washed their hands of this issue and are not concerned with this issue,” said Nugent. “In fact, worrying about our students’ health and safety around alcohol takes an enormous amount of our energy. Every weekend during school we are on tenterhooks worrying about whether one of our students is in serious harm. By no means are we closing our eyes or turning our backs.”
Nugent said college administrators are doing the very best they can to enforce the current law.
“Not obeying the law is not an option,” she said. “That’s one of the things that makes it so hard. One of the things we wrestle with as educators and presidents is probably the same thing that parents wrestle with. Under the [current] law, you have no option but to say ‘you must never drink alcohol until you are 21.’ We know for the vast majority of people that’s unrealistic.
“So you’re in an untenable position. Either you are telling your children they are going to be a teetotaler until they are 21 or they are going to be engaging in illegal behavior. What we wish parents could tell their children is, “Now that you’re whatever appropriate age, drink responsibly. Learn to moderate.’ But that’s not a message we can send right now.”
Some have said that lowering the drinking age would increase overall alcohol consumption, and Nugent admits that may be the case.
“Some researchers speculate that were the drinking age to go down, there would be a short-term spike in overall consumption, which would then level off,” she said.
Related to that, another point the initiative makes is that drinking more frequently is potentially less dangerous than binge drinking.
“The real enemy is binge drinking,” Nugent said. “We are not against alcohol. What we are against is the abuse of alcohol. That’s one of the difficulties we find ourselves in. We’re essentially in a period of a mini-prohibition. And we know from our own experience and from the experience in a couple of other nations that tried it, that prohibition has not been successful.”
Nugent said the human tendency to go after “forbidden fruit” may be a factor in underage binge drinking.
“I think a good way to look at that is to think of one’s own experience as a parent — whether it’s ice cream that’s off limits or you can’t go into that drawer, or whatever it is — I do think there’s a fairly strong tendency just in human nature for the forbidden to exercise a kind of lure. We do hear from students that what partly contributes to their desire to over-indulge in alcohol is the fact that it’s forbidden, that it’s ‘being naughty.’”
Nugent said every culture has some sort of rite-of-passage to adulthood.
“We could even say we know men and women are going to want to mark their passage into maturity, and cultures can shape those,” she said.
She is concerned that binge drinking has become that rite in the United States.
“Many rites of passage,” she said, “traditionally involve doing something unusual, outside the bounds of the normal, even dangerous. But, the concept now of ‘21 shots on your 21st birthday’ is a new phenomenon.”
Although no other developed country has a 21-year-old minimum age for consuming alcohol, the Amethyst Initiative is not specifically saying the drinking age should be lowered. Nugent said things are being taken one step at a time, and said that informed dialog is an important aspect of the solution.
“We’re saying,” she explained, “let’s get clear, as clear as we can, about what the true effect of the current practice is, and then let’s look at whether there are other alternatives we could imagine. Discover what we can learn from others and just think about ways that we can handle young people and alcohol more effectively.
“Some of the best ways that we might develop alternatives are by looking more intensely at the research, looking more intensely at the experience of other countries and other times, and see what’s been successful or not.”
