Tilghman will not sign petition to lower drinking age

Started by Middlebury College President John McCardell, the Amethyst Initiative petitions the government to openly discuss lowering the drinking age from 21, with the goal of lessening the dangerous binge drinking that is rampant among underage college students.

Though the petition has the support of Dartmouth President James Wright as well as the leaders of 128 other institutions of higher education, Princeton will not follow suit, Tilghman said.

“The primary reason is that it is my policy not to sign petitions unless it is directly addressing an issue I ... have a clear opinion on,” she explained, adding “that is not the case with this issue.”

“In my view, there are many other important issues that the University has to engage Washington with at the moment,” she added. “You have to pick your shots, and this initiative has very little chance of changing the law.”

Tilghman said, however, that she does have a philosophical objection to the current state of the law.

“I cannot reconcile allowing 18-year-olds to fight and die for their country and then forbid them from imbibing a legal substance such as alcohol,” she explained. “I think they are either adults or not adults.”

Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Hilary Herbold finds fault with the current drinking age from a more practical standpoint.

“A difficulty with a drinking age of 21 is that it does not align very well with the commonly-held opinions and attitudes of many Americans, of many ages,” she said in an e-mail. ”As a result, many people under 21 do drink in spite of the law.”

This tension between law and practice makes it more difficult for the University to talk openly with students about alcohol issues, Herbold added.

“The current drinking law, in effect, makes it more difficult to say, ‘We understand that drinking, and social events that include alcohol, do occur at college, and we’d like to talk with you about how to use alcohol safely,’ ” she said.

Both Tilghman and Herbold said that though students do not frequently leave Princeton’s campus by automobile, lowering the drinking age could have a very different effect nationwide.

“[W]ithin a culture like ours, composed of 18- to 22-year-olds whose use of cars is limited, the [current] drinking age may bring fewer pluses and more minuses than it may to communities outside our walls,” Herbold explained.

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Data suggest an inverse relationship between drinking age and drunk-driving accidents; a higher drinking age correlates with fewer drunk-driving incidents. Tilghman said, however, that she does not believe the data on the relationship between drunk driving and the drinking age are conclusive.

“One place where I differ with the Amethyst Initiative is that I think the data is not compelling in one way or another,” she said.

Tilghman added that cases from European countries — where the drinking age is 18 or even lower, but alcohol abuse on college campuses can be just as pervasive as in the United States — merit further examination before any action is taken.

The University, in the meantime, will continue to try to find ways to promote safety within the current legal framework, Herbold said.

“We are obliged to recognize the drinking age as long as it remains the law, and within its constraints, to work together to promote safe and responsible decisions about alcohol,” she explained.

Members of the Alcohol Coalition Committee, which studied alcohol use on campus and released its report last May, declined to comment.