o colleges want the drinking age lowered to 18.  This has to be a college student’s dream come true.  College is surely a rite of passage; and nowadays, at any rate, getting rip-roaring drunk seems to be a part of that rite of passage.  This is in fact what a great many college students do, the illegality of under-aged-drinking to the contrary notwithstanding.  And now students even have colleges on their side.  I can hear any number of students who are off to college saying to themselves: If this is a dream, don’t wake me up !   

I do not need to rehearse the arguments for lowering the drinking age to 18: If at the age of 18 people can vote and, more importantly, they can go to war thereby risking their very lives, then they should damn well be able to drink at the age of 18.  It is that argument which got the drinking lowered in the first place.  The problem, of course, was that it had absolutely disastrous consequences in terms of young people losing their lives owing to drunk-driving.  Hence, the drinking age was raised back to 21.

It is extremely interesting, then, that many colleges are favoring lowering the drinking age back to 18.  The most obvious question that arises is this: What is motivating colleges to take that stance? 

This question turns out to be a particularly potent one, since there is next to no evidence at all that 18 year olds now have a much greater sense of personal responsibility and self-discipline than their counterparts did back-in-the-day.  What we can all agree on is that 18 year olds have vastly more freedom nowadays than 18 years old had back-in-the-day.  What is more, and this gets to the heart of the matter, colleges once had the status of locus in parentis—parents away from home.  Professors had some measure of “parental authority” over students.  A professor could very well say to a student back then: “Listen, young woman or man, you should not act like that”.  And it would never have occurred to the student to retort: “You are not my parent”.  That day, of course, has completely vanished.  And the nasty attitude of parents has played a large role in the disappearance of the locus in parentis moral backdrop on college campuses.  For parental love has come to mean that parents defend their children no matter what their children do. 

In view of these considerations, there is a very straightforward sense in which colleges today play a far less important role in promoting responsibility and self-discipline among young people than colleges once did.  Indeed, it is arguable that nowadays colleges play next to no role at all in promoting these values among students.  In fact, the college campus has become a breeding ground for irresponsibility and the utter lack of foresight.  And ironically one reason for this is that on most college campuses the very idea of right and wrong is routinely considered an antiquated idea—a hang-up of which people need to free themselves.  The college campus is not, whatever else it might be, an environment that is conducive to the acquisition of a deep sense of personal responsibility and self-discipline. 

Here is a different and more poignant way to put the point: If a student does not arrive on college with a very deep sense of personal responsibility and self-discipline, it is extremely unlikely that she or he will become a more responsible and self-disciplined individual as a result of what transpires on campus.  Over the years, I have been blessed to teach some extraordinary students.  But each and every one of them came to the moment with an extraordinary sense of personal responsibility and self-discipline.  All that I and the college did if anything was merely provide additional buttressing for a marvelous moral structure that was already in place. 

Against this backdrop, there is something particularly odd about colleges being supportive of lowering the drinking age, especially in view of the fact that their argument is woefully stale, namely that keeping the drinking age at 21 is not working.  That is true enough.  One does not need to be a sociologist to grasp that reality.  But the most obvious question on the face of the earth is: Why is having the drinking age at 21 not working?  And the answer to that question is most disconcerting, namely that self-indulgence on the college campus has become a rite of passage.  Needless to say, self-indulgence is the very antithesis of personal responsibility and self-discipline. 

In effect, then, colleges are arguing that we should lower the age because the mindset of self-indulgence is an insuperable impediment to college students obeying the law.  I could be mistaken, but I think that this constitutes a horrendously bad argument.  Remember when people thought that it was a woman’s fault for being raped precisely because, after all, what else was a man supposed to do when a woman’s behavior “caused” him to be sexually aroused other than have sex with her. 

There may be good reasons for lowering the drinking age, but flagrant irresponsibility cannot possibly be one of them.

This brings me to MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).  MADD, of course, remains steadfastly opposed to lowering the drinking age to 18.  All MADD needs to point out is that from a social point of there is, on two levels, a vast structural difference between voting and military service, on the one hand, and drinking, on the other.  (a) The first two do not admit of peer pressure in anything like the way in which drinking does.  (b) The very nature of the first two activities is not such that engaging in them thereby renders one less capable of acting responsibly, whereas this is precisely what drinking occasions.  What everyone knows is that drinking invariably lowers inhibitions.