Choose Responsibility President John McCardell said during a Kennedy Political Union event Tuesday that he was not fazed by AU President Neil Kerwin's decision to not sign on to the Amethyst Initiative.
John McCardell Interview |
McCardell, a former Middlebury College president, drafted the Amethyst Initiative, an effort by college presidents to reconsider lowering the drinking age in each state from the current age limit of 21.
There was no one specific incident that motivated McCardell to re-open the discussion of the legal drinking age, he said.
"Being both a parent and a college president made me see that the law we have right now - it isn't working."
Kerwin was not among the 130 college and university presidents who signed on to the initiative, The Eagle previously reported. McCardell said he was not deterred from speaking at AU because of this.
"This is an amethyst campus in spirit if not in signature just by having me here," McCardell said.
KPU Director Bill DeBaun said the Office of Campus Life originated the idea to have McCardell speak on campus.
"We like to bring people in from across the board," he said. "Students are used to being lectured on alcohol, and here we have a figure who has really examined the situation from all sides. Students aren't used to hearing that every day."
Currently, states determine the legal age of alcohol consumption and purchase. The federal government created a provision that says that any state that sets the drinking age below 21 will lose 10 percent of its highway funding.
"Some call this an incentive," McCardell said. "Others call it bribery, threats."
States should have the opportunity to make new laws that reconsider the drinking age, but not necessarily to lower it to age 18, he said.
"It's not that we should just lower the drinking age to 18 because that would be exactly as useless as making it 21 was. We have to give states a chance to create new laws, see what happens," McCardell said.
Current alcohol education programs in schools are too apocalyptic, and do not educate students on responsible drinking, but rather just condemns alcohol altogether, he said. Alcohol licenses, which he compared to driver's licenses, could be distributed to 18-year-olds after a certain training course and with no transgressions.
McCardell's main objective is to allow for the re-working of the law in many different ways. This will only happen, he says, when states are no longer penalized for having a legal drinking age lower than the age of 21.
Kevin Eng, a junior in the School of Communication, said these alterations could have consequences.
"I think it's too late," he said. "It's been so engrained in our psyche that we have to be 21 that even something that progressed slowly, you would have to deal with huge short-term problems. In the short term, it would be a disaster."
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