100 College Presidents Urging Dumb Decision

You can't assume education equals wisdom, as these college presidents demonstrate:

College presidents from about 100 of the nation's best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.

The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age.

"This is a law that is routinely evaded," said John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization. "It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory."

Other prominent schools in the group include Syracuse, Tufts, Colgate, Kenyon and Morehouse.

But even before the presidents begin the public phase of their efforts, which may include publishing newspaper ads in the coming weeks, they are already facing sharp criticism.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD officials are even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

"It's very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses," said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.

Both sides agree alcohol abuse by college students is a huge problem.

This is the same kind of misguided liberal logic that tells us that we have to give high school kids condoms because they're going to have sex anyway.

Alcohol on college campuses is a huge problem already as we witnessed firsthand last year when my daughter's roommate was kicked out of the dorm for multiple alcohol and drug violations. She was 18 and apparently these wise college presidents would rather her alcohol abuse was legal. Instead of having to sneak around, she could have just walked in with her bottles of booze and drank herself to insensibility.

In California the drinking age is 21, so it doesn't really matter what the college president thinks since he'll be bound by that law either way. Of course, he could just choose to have his police department ignore violations.

You know, some kids are going to cheat, too. Why shouldn't we give them all A's?