May 5, 2011
A common lesson of growing up is that if you make a promise, you should keep it. But over the past two years, a 199-year-old — Hamilton College — has forgotten a major promise it made to both the campus community and the public: signing the Amethyst Initiative. Instead of the constructive dialogue on drinking that we were promised, substantial crackdowns on the consumption of alcohol have occurred without an ongoing evaluation of effective policy.
In August 2008, President Stewart informed the Hamilton community that she had joined numerous college and university presidents and chancellors in signing the Amethyst Initiative. The stated goals are to promote open discussion about the United States’ current legal drinking age of 21. According to the Initiative’s website, its goal is “to encourage moderation and responsibility as an alternative to the drunkenness and reckless decisions about alcohol that mark the experience of many young Americans.” The Initiative recognizes that the current drinking age policy is not effectively combating young adults’ underground drinking culture.
But nearly three years after President Stewart was added to the Amethyst Initiative’s list of signatories, it seems that little has been done at Hamilton to advance the Initiative’s mission. The College’s efforts to reopen the drinking age debate have been nearly nonexistent over the past couple of years. President Stewart created the Coalition on Alcohol and Other Drugs to find ways to reduce the negative impact of alcohol and drugs on the campus community. However, the committee has not led to much dialogue, in part because so few students serve on it, but it did implement new rules that crack down on campus drinking.
One of these strategies involves increasing points for hard alcohol violations. By cracking down on the hard alcohol policy, however, the administration creates a more dangerous situation by indirectly encouraging students to drink to excess in the privacy of their dorm rooms. In reprimanding students for hard alcohol consumption, the College does not solve the problem — it just pushes drinking culture further underground and out of sight.
Inclusive campus discussions on these issues have proven difficult because there is no active interest group on campus that supports adults’ responsible consumption of alcohol. This is likely the “silent majority” of Hamilton students, unwilling to come forward either due to lack of interest or fear of being the nail that sticks out too far.
We encourage these students to come forward and foster conversations about establishing a responsible middle ground between excessive drinking and severe restrictions on consuming alcohol. We believe that the Amethyst Initiative’s objectives are necessary to ensure that Hamilton is a safe place for students, and we call on the administration to remember its pledge to the Initiative. This does not mean that the discussions will conclude that the drinking age should be lowered or that we necessarily think that this is the best path; however, we need to begin having discussions that would find practical means to reduce the excessive and dangerous drinking that often occurs across college campuses.