UW officials hesitate to join drinking age debate
University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly is aware of a push by some leaders of higher education to ask lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage binge drinking on campus.
And while Reilly isn't ready to jump onto that bandwagon just yet, he didn't discount the notion, either.
"I think before I would personally want to take any stance on that I would really want to get into the research and decide whether I believe dropping the drinking age would diminish abusive drinking," Reilly said during a break in Thursday's UW System Board of Regents meeting at Van Hise Hall on the UW-Madison campus. "I just don't know yet because I haven't had a chance to look at that research that closely.
"What I can tell you is that all our campuses have very major programs designed at teaching our students how to drink responsibly and convincing them that not all their peers are going out and drinking irresponsibly every weekend. And regardless of the legal age, we will continue to work on those programs very hard."
Leaders of more than 100 colleges and universities from across the United States -- including Ohio State, Maryland, Syracuse, Duke and Dartmouth -- have signed the Amethyst Initiative, a movement launched in July of 2008 to provoke national debate about the drinking age.
Elizabeth Burmaster, the former Madison West High School principal who now is in her second term as Wisconsin's superintendent of public instruction, also said she hadn't given the idea of lowering the drinking age enough thought to take a stance on the issue one way or the other.
"I was, of course, a product of the era of where the drinking age was 18," said Burmaster, who is a member of the Board of Regents. "And I know having been a high school principal a lot of the issues if they were to lower it to 18. I think the problematic thing, of course, is the same way it was years ago in my generation -- we're asking young people to serve their country and other things, and yet we don't consider them, in that way, as an adult. So it's going to be a major debate."
Ripon College president David Joyce is the only leader from the state of Wisconsin who has signed on with the initiative. Ripon College is a four-year, private liberal arts and sciences college with about 1,000 undergraduates. Ripon is located 75 miles northeast of Madison.
A list of colleges whose presidents have joined the Amethyst Initiative is available at www.amethystinitiative.org.
UW-Madison officials said that although they did receive information about the Amethyst Initiative, the school decided not to make a decision on an institutional commitment due to the upcoming change in leadership. UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley is stepping down on Sept. 1 and is being replaced by Carolyn "Biddy" Martin.
Martin indicated in an interview Wednesday that she still was undecided on the debate about possibly lowering the drinking age. Cornell University, where Martin had been provost for the past eight years, did not sign the Amethyst Initiative.
University of Miami President Donna Shalala, chancellor at UW-Madison from 1988 to 1993, declined to sign.
"I remember college campuses when we had 18-year-old drinking ages, and I honestly believe we've made some progress," Shalala, who served as secretary of health and human services under President Clinton, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "To just shift it back down to the high schools makes no sense at all."
When Shalala was at UW-Madison, the drinking age already was 21.
The Amethyst Initiative statement the presidents have signed avoids calling explicitly for a younger drinking age. Rather, it seeks "an informed and dispassionate debate" over the issue and the federal highway law that made 21 the de facto national drinking age by denying money to any state that bucks the trend.
But the statement makes clear the signers think the current law isn't working, citing a "culture of dangerous, clandestine binge-drinking," and noting that while adults under 21 can vote and enlist in the military, they "are told they are not mature enough to have a beer." Furthermore, "by choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.''
Toby Talbot/Associated Press
Presidents from more than 100 U.S. colleges have signed the Amethyst Initiative, which states that the 21-year-old drinking age has created a culture of harmful binge drinking.
