September 29, 2011
On Friday afternoon in Kirner-Johnson 201—the same room where the Alcohol Coalition holds its meetings—trustee and author of Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess Barry Seaman ’67 and Vice President and Dean of Students Nancy Thompson led the discussion, “Alcohol on Campus: Should the Drinking Age be 21?”
This question was enough to pack the classroom with alumni, parents and students. Many brought in extra chairs and several stood throughout the discussion.
Seaman currently serves as president of the non-profit organization Choose Responsibility, which in July 2008 created The Amethyst Initiative, a public statement signed by 136 college and university chancellors and presidents—including President Joan Hinde Stewart—which states that “21 is not working” and that “it’s time to rethink the drinking age.”
“A strong case can be made for 18 because it is the age we in the United States have settled upon as the marker of legal adulthood,” said Seamen. “The result [of Legal 21] has been that alcohol has become the holy grail, the forbidden fruit, the one missing tile in the mosaic of adulthood for young Americans—and it shouldn’t be that important.”
Even though Thompson admitted that she stands “a little torn” on whether lowering the drinking age would positively affect college drinking culture, she also said, “Lowering the drinking age would certainly make my life easier.” She continued to note the same contradiction that Seaman pointed out: Legal 21 means “saying students are adults and treating them like children.” She added, “One could argue, they’re behaving accordingly.”
In recent years, Hamilton College has made multiple efforts to combat the negative effects of on-campus drinking. In 2005, the Point System was established in large part to reduce vandalism, a goal the system has been quite effective with. Thompson confirmed that the College is “now checking much more carefully” on all-campus events. “We’re dealing with behavior,” she said. “But policing it to the point where it becomes even more dangerous behind closed doors? I don’t think that’s the solution either.”
The Point System additionally seeks to influence students’ choice of drink. Thompson somewhat humorously referred to the College’s policy on hard alcohol as “bonus points.” The System officially states that students “under the age of 21 who are found in violation of the alcohol policy and are using hard alcohol will receive three additional points to their sanction.”
The effectiveness of the policy on hard alcohol remains questionable. When Thompson asked for a student opinion, Kelsey Hiscano ’12, who has experienced the College with and without this policy, answered: “I think that the majority of kids do drink hard alcohol, and maybe even more so behind closed doors than before.”
While Choose Responsibility promotes several ways to reduce the negative consequences of underage drinking—for instance, “require alcohol education” and “treat drinking, like driving, as a privilege that is earned”—it does not have a sure way to fix what Seamen called “the overgrowth of a culture,” nor for that matter, does anyone else.
“No one that I know of has found a really successful way of dealing with this problem,” said Thompson, just as the hour of listing statistics, explaining, and defending, College policies drew to a close. “Bad things that happen often happen around alcohol. And they’re still happening.”