McCardell challenges 'prohibition'

Author: Kathryn Flagg

President Emeritus John M. McCardell, Jr., has been commissioned by the Robertson Foundation in New York to produce a thorough analysis of the effect of the 21-year-old drinking age on underage alcohol consumption. The research is tied intimately to McCardell's own convictions, his disagreement with the drinking age having been made public last year after McCardell stepped down as President. His research is inspired in large part by McCardell's time as president, during which he observed with frustration what he believed to be the unintended consequences of faulty legislation.

McCardell first publicly broached the subject of underage drinking on campuses last fall in an op-ed article published in The New York Times. The piece, billed "What Your College President Didn't Tell You," tackled controversial issues of tenure and student-faculty ratios, but arguably garnered the most attention for its candid assessment of drinking on college campuses.

Following the publication of the article, the Robertson Foundation approached McCardell and essentially commissioned its report. The report, prepared by McCardell with the help and input of student researchers, other experts and several former college presidents, is slated for completion by June 1, 2006.

"This isn't an issue that very many, if any, sitting college presidents are willing to tackle," said McCardell - a fact he himself noted in the Sept. 13 op-ed. "You can only stick your head above the parapets so many times."

"I also understood," he said last fall in an interview with The Middlebury Campus, "that so long as I was President, when I spoke ,I spoke as President, not as John McCardell, and my views, no matter how I may have tried to distinguish them, were assumed to be those of Middlebury College."

Now, following the inauguration last year of President Ronald D. Liebowitz and a one-year hiatus for the President Emeritus, McCardell returns to the campus as a professor of History and any qualms about speaking on behalf of the College seem to have been resolved. McCardell's research is still very much in its early stages, however. Student research assistants are currently compiling data that will be used in writing the report this spring.

"I think it's valuable for us to be examining this topic because it is something of an issue on college campuses across the country," said Conor Stinson '06.5. "There are very strong polarized sides to this and there's a lot of room for gray area. It's a topic that, because of its nature, needs to be examined more closely."

The research will produce what McCardell referred to as a "white paper" - a documented study of the current law and its intended and unintended results.

"Whether that will lead to any particular legislative solutions, I don't know. It may all stop with that," said McCardell. "At a minimum it will create a document that we hope will really initiate serious public discussion about this that is not emotional, that is not hysterical, and that is based upon evidence, reliable evidence and clearly discernible cause-and-effect relationships."



A Look at the Law

McCardell's research focuses primarily on legislation enacted in 1984 designed to reduce the number of fatalities caused by alcohol-related automobile accidents. The Federal 21 Minimum Drinking Age Law, as signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, requires states to uphold the 21-year-old drinking age in order to be eligible for federal highway funds.

However, according to McCardell, "[the law] hasn't really accomplished what it was created to accomplish." McCardell acknowledges that since 1984, fatalities as a result of alcohol-related automobile accidents have decreased by about 1,000 lives per year, but he argues that no concrete cause-and-effect relationship can be drawn between the legislation and fatalities.

"Automobiles are safer, seatbelt laws are now mandatory, airbags are in cars. 'Designated driver' was not a term that anyone in 1984 would have recognized," he said. "There is no evidence to show that the decline [in fatalities] has anything to do with the law and I think it is unfounded for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to claim that the law is responsible for the reduction in the number of those fatalities."

Noting that the number of alcohol-related fatalities in the 21- to 24-year-old age bracket has actually risen since 1984, McCardell continued, "Even if you're prepared to concede that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the law and the statistics, the best you can argue is that the law has postponed these fatalities and it certainly hasn't eliminated them."

McCardell has also argued that the solution to tackling drunk driving is not to raise the drinking age to 21. "We're all against drunk driving," he said. "Let's talk about drunk driving. Let's not talk about prohibition."

McCardell commented that, in addition to seeing groups committed to opposing drunk driving, the community would benefit from organizations supporting responsible drinking.

In addition to the arguably faulty correlation between drunk driving and fatalities, McCardell has identified other arenas where rhetoric, lacking solid evidence, still strives to support the 21-year-old drinking age. He acknowledged that many proponents of the law argue that the adolescent brain is not yet fully developed at age 18 and is at risk of brain impairment when exposed to alcohol.

"Where might we find something that would carry that argument beyond mere assertion to fact?" said McCardell. "Is anyone willing to say that that generation of Americans who were allowed to drink when the age was 18 is, as a group, brain impaired? If they are, let's see the evidence, let's take the evidence to heart, and let's say, 'You know what, you've got a point. We've turned out a generation of seriously retarded people.'"



The Problems with Prohibition

Take a trip to the MADD Web site, McCardell argues, and you'll read plenty about the evils of alcohol - more so, he believes, than you will find regarding the issues that gave birth to the organization. "They have become, in my view, a temperance organization and strayed from their original purpose while remaining adamant about the 21-year-old drinking age," he said. Representatives from the Addison County and national chapters of MADD were unavailable for comment at press time.

This rhetoric of prohibition colors the debate on the legal drinking age in America, McCardell said, without allowing for discussion of the very real results of maintaining the drinking age at 21. The lesson of prohibition in every era, he said, is that drinking goes up - a lesson learned in the 1920s and again in the dormitories of today's college students.

"Drinking on college campuses has gone up in the last 20 years," McCardell said. "That drinking is taking place behind closed doors, underground and off-campus. So we are less able to manage it, to control it, to regulate than we were in the days when it was out in the open."

The underground alcohol culture on college campuses is not the only adverse and unintended consequence of the 21-year-old drinking age. McCardell argues that the law abridges the age of majority in a sense that today's generation of college students - young adults who can legally serve in the military, sit on juries and sign legal contracts - should find unacceptable. The burden of proof, he says, lies with those who would argue that in this singular case the age of majority should [be] and appropriately is abridged.

"We've never had that argument," said McCardell. "We've never really had that debate."

Finally, McCardell asserts that there is a moral component to today's law that provokes "harmful and threatening" consequences.

"Laws that are easily circumvented, laws that are only selectively or capriciously e
nforced, laws that seem to those to whom they apply irrational, incomprehensible, inexplicable, are laws that as a result are evaded," he said. "And that breeds disrespect for law."



The McCardell Plan

"So, what is the solution?" asked McCardell. According to McCardell, recognizing that prohibition is ineffective in responsibly handling underage drinking is the first step towards creating more effective legislation to address the consequences of the law.

"Wouldn't it be better for us on college campuses to be held accountable for how well we educate students in the responsible use of alcohol?" he said. "Right now we're being held accountable for something that we can't control, manage, or in any way oversee."

McCardell likened alcohol education on the College campus to a driver's education class in which students see videos, read literature and listen to lectures on responsible driving while never actually sitting behind the wheel of an automobile. "No one, nobody would say that's a way to handle driver's education. That's how we handle alcohol education. That's alcohol education on this campus and on every other campus. It's illogical, it's irrational, it makes no sense - that's how we deal with alcohol."

Addressing alcohol use in a responsible, rational way is the cornerstone of McCardell's philosophy. Connected to this approach is the need for both consistent use of the age of majority and effective application of more serious laws and penalties.

"Yes, some people will behave irresponsibly. Some people vote irresponsibly. We need to acknowledge that," he said. "That doesn't mean that everyone should be penalized for the sins of a few. And if you do violate the law, the penalties should be much more severe than they are."

Make the penalties stiff enough, McCardell argued, and people will observe the law.



The White Paper Report

McCardell's own convictions aside, research continues for the Robertson report, aided by visits to the campus from leading experts and input from other former college presidents. McCardell's team of researchers is also examining the legal ramifications of the drinking law in other states and pulling together existing statistics and alcohol research.

"People can have fairly visceral reactions to this topic," said Stinson, "but any visceral reaction you have is automatically questioned by the fact that there are so many facets to this issue."

McCardell noted that the group is laying fairly low at this point and, until concrete results have been made, will not solicit any publicity. However, he does recognize the academic merits of the research.

"This is research that has at least potentially a policy outcome and it certainly is an education in how original intent can morph into a whole different set of considerations," he said.

Stinson and McCardell both have expressed hope that the final report will generate discourse on a local and national level.

"It's clearly something that every college has to deal with, even if they promote themselves as a dry campus," said Stinson. "On a larger scale, I would hope that it promotes discussion on a widespread scale at colleges. Hopefully that would then push it forward to some sort of legislative body."

Grace Kronenberg '06, another student researcher for the project, agreed that the project bears weight for college campuses across the country. "For lawmakers to believe that a student can spend three full years in a residential college setting and abstain from alcohol use is assinine, and leads to poorly informed policy like the present minimum legal drinking age," she said. "By the time we're 18 we're adults in all other legal and most sociocultural contexts."