By now, Lawnparties are over, and only a sea of dust from Quadrangle Club and a few stray plastic cups remain as physical evidence of the crush of people who filled Prospect Avenue over the past day. If we didn’t already know what Lawnparties entails, we’ve learned it by now. Officially, we’ve spent the afternoon celebrating the beginning of school with excellent musicians and great friends, partying in a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate summer and stave off our coursework for one more day. Unofficially, of course, many of us will have used the event as a chance to get totally sloshed before noon, stumbling around Cannon Club’s lawn with a cup of beer in each hand or begging Terrans for one of their bottles of Andre.
I’m not going to waste my breath complaining about the degeneracy of youth today or the no-holds-barred hedonism that drives modern society or whatnot, because that kind of argument is boring to read and shows a writer out of touch with the campus on which he purports to comment. So long as there are no serious injuries, I see no harm in continuing the day-drinking tradition of Lawnparties. We’re theoretically responsible enough to live without parental supervision, survive near-impossible classes on our own terms and apply for jobs — if we want to kick back and relax (or rage) for an afternoon, so be it.
However, I think Lawnparties is a good jumping-off point for thinking about one of the lesser-discussed forms of institutional privilege that comes along with attending a school like Princeton: except in very extreme cases, we are almost never punished for underage drinking. Most of us have at least heard of the policy outlined in theAlcohol and Other Drug Use brochurethat states “neither intoxication nor admission to UHS for intoxication will be grounds for disciplinary action,” and we know that the University is concerned first and foremost with keeping its students safe with respect to drinking. Moreover, aside fromthe 20-odd students arrested over the course of the past few yearsby a Princeton police officer for purchasing liquor while underage, it’s difficult to find any on-campus examples of disciplinary action levied against Princeton students for alcohol-specific charges.
Somewhat counterintuitively, this isn’t a bad thing in and of itself — after all, if we’re drinking mostly responsibly and not putting the lives of others in danger, what do we care if we have a beer or two at an eating club on a Saturday night? Unfortunately, many of our non-Princeton peers — especially those not at a university whose prestige can sometimes allow it impunity from some facets of the law — are not able to partake in that same privilege. We see this pretty frequently in the news —take the 133 arrests for underage drinking made at end-of-summer concerts in New York, for example — but it’s not something we often discuss. There is no reason other 19- and 20-year-olds, especially those who drink at least as responsibly as the average Princeton student, should be subject to more stringent policing than we are. Crackdowns inevitably happen sporadically and irregularly, but such a disparity between disciplinary action on campus and off campus is shocking.
As such, I’d like to propose the most reasonable solution I can think of: lowering the legal drinking age to 19. We as Princeton students are lucky to have the resources we do to deal with alcohol-related issues, from short-term binge drinking care to longer-term counseling for mental illnesses begotten from alcohol. By establishing the drinking age as 21, countless young adults just under that cutoff who don’t attend a universityare often unable to access similar opportunities, and are thus deprived of the same ability to learn to drink responsibly on their own terms, without fear of legal repercussions. If wewereto lower the legal drinking age (which I’ve set at 19 instead of 18 to cut down on high schoolers’ access to alcohol — there are a lot more 18-year-old seniors than 19-year-old seniors), those resources suddenly become available, and the corrosive legal need to hide problems pertaining to alcohol disappears.
Of course, in the big scheme of things this is a very small issue. There are other discussions of institutional privilege we should probably be having before talking about underage alcohol consumption, and we can do a better job on almost all those other, more important fronts. However, with this small change to our nation’s current alcohol policy, we can reduce at least one completely arbitrary manifestation of this privilege. By lowering the legal drinking age, we can better regulate the drinking of young adults whether they are in a college setting or not, de-stigmatize the treatment of problems related to alcohol and increase access to resources for healthier consumption. We manage to stay remarkably safe on our own campus — it’s time to allow that safety to our peers.
Will Rivitz is a sophomore from Brookline, Mass. He can be reached at wrivitz@princeton.edu.
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