Editorials The College Kid's Campaign and Wiki-Wrangling

Author: The Campus Editorial Board

A campaign for the college 'kid'

This newspaper is written, reported, edited and published by a body of writers and editors who, for the most part, are under the age of 21. In addition to publishing a newspaper, underage people can serve in the military, adopt children, marry one another, become legal guardians for minors, sit on juries and vote in elections. The major anomaly among this myriad freedoms is the right to consume alcohol.

With regards to alcohol, 18- to 20-year-old adults are juveniles in the United States. And when society regards a group of people as adults in nearly every respect, and then treats them like children in another, the inevitable result is adults who act like children.

Choose Responsibility, the not-for-profit group College President Emeritus John M. McCardell and his team of researchers have founded, has developed a smart proposal that would begin to address the dangerous drinking climate young people face today.

The conception of the Legal Age 21 law, as McCardell's team points out, was a response to drunk driving. But evidence cannot be marshaled to confidently attribute the national decline in underage drunk driving fatalities to the drinking age law. The impact of seatbelt laws, vehicle design improvements, designated driver programs and other efforts have all arguably saved far more lives than drinking age legislation. Taking into account the law's negative effects on adolescent drinking - from hidden college binge drinking to a new spike in alcohol-automobile fatalities at age 21 - it may be that the minimum drinking age has just postponed fatalities, or even caused new ones.

And the big collegiate problem that inspired McCardell's research - campuses that want to teach students to responsibly consume alcohol but would be prosecuted if they supervised underage drinking - gets worse every year. Numerous incidents on Middlebury's own campus bear witness to the animosity between students and administrators forced to enforce Legal Age 21.

We strongly endorse Choose Responsibility's proposal for an underage alcohol licensing program, and hope a reasoned debate will ensue over the organization's research.

Drinking is a privilege that bears responsibility and it should be understood as such. But an educational alcohol license program would not only give young adults the opportunity to act like adults, it would teach them how to act like adults as well.


Ban the Wiki-wrangling

By design, entries in Wikipedia are subject to a constant evolution that can produce both great articles and glaring inaccuracies. But Wikipedia succeeds in creating a resource that offers discriminating readers solid introductions to an array of topics.

Over winter term, however, the History Department approved a resolution effectively banning the use of Wikipedia for essays and exams. The History Department was correct that Wikipedia should not be a significant source for research papers, but students should not feel in any way discouraged to absorb opinions and information from a wide range of sources when doing research.

More worrisome is that, with their resolution and with professors' interviews appearing everywhere from the Chronicle of Higher Education to the Associated Press, Middlebury has become that school that had to tell its students not to cite an open encyclopedia. The Office of Public Affairs even decided to publicize the odd distinction with a summary of the coverage on the college's website.

Professors have every right to call students out for lazy research habits, or to demand that students consult peer-reviewed sources for a paper or exam. But the resolution from the History Department was a big, booming declaration to the world, where a subtle reminder to students would have been more appropriate.