The following editorial is appearing in The Mercury Saturday, Aug. 23. I include it here with the personal observation that if the presidents of either of the colleges my 19-year-old children attend were on this list, I would be very displeased.
I am not suggesting that the colleges on this list condone drinking, but I believe the presidents of these institutions are sending the wrong message and directing their energy in the wrong direction.
I wrote the following Opinion piece as a newspaper editor; I offer it here as a mother.

The college presidents calling for a national debate on drinking age laws are a disappointing lot.
The group includes heads of some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, including Duke, Dartmouth, and Syracuse, as well as about 100 other prestigious schools of higher learning.They have put their names on a statement calling for a debate on the legal drinking age -- disappointing because it is a cop-out that fails to truly address the national problem of alcohol abuse on college campuses.
Those on the list support a statement that places blame for drinking among college students on laws that make it illegal, rather than on a culture that condones it.
Pennsylvania schools whose presidents signed the initiative include Arcadia, Cedar Crest, Dickinson, Elizabethtown, Gettysburg, Lafayette, Moravian, Muhlenberg, St. Joseph’s University, and Widener.
The list does not include Albright, Alvernia and Ursinus colleges or Penn State and the Pennsylvania system of state colleges and universities. Neither Temple nor Drexel universities are on the list.
The movement called The Amethyst Initiative petitions lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.
The statement supported by college presidents 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.
The Amethyst Initiative takes its name from ancient Greece, where the purple gemstone amethyst was widely believed to ward off drunkenness if used in drinking vessels and jewelry.
John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization, said the legal drinking age laws are considered “unjust and unfair and discriminatory,” among those to whom the laws are directed.
Supporters of the initiative say that lowering the drinking age would help because if students were exposed to alcohol legally at a younger age, they would not get caught up in binge drinking when they go to college.
That theory falls apart on several fronts. One is that oftentimes the students who fall into binge drinking habits at college are those who experimented with alcohol in high school. Age is not as big a factor in the abandon of alcohol abuse as the sense of freedom and being on your own that college provides.
The theory also does not take into account that binge-drinking is as serious a problem among 21-year-olds as among 19- or 20-year-olds. And, the statistics that are showing underage drinking reaching epidemic proportions demonstrate the greatest problem is on college campuses.
Is it age or independence that is the trigger?
The one point on which we can agree with The Amethyst Initiative is that the problem is growing worse and cries out for attention. One study has estimated more than 500,000 full-time students at four-year colleges suffer injuries each year related in some way to drinking, and about 1,700 die as a result.
A recent Associated Press analysis of federal records found that 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, drank themselves to death from 1999 through 2005.McCardell has said that college students will drink no matter what, but do so more dangerously when it’s illegal.But, Alexander Wagenaar, a University of Florida epidemiologist and expert on how changes in the drinking age affect safety, characterized the initiative as a copout. The college presidents “see a problem of drinking on college campuses, and they don’t want to deal with it,” Wagenaar told The Associated Press.
“I wish these college presidents sat around and tried to work out ways to deal with the problem on their campus rather than try to eliminate the problem by defining it out of existence,” said Henry Wechsler of the Harvard School of Public Health.
The failure is not with the laws that prohibit drinking; the failure is with a culture that does little to discourage or control it.
Making it legal to drink at a younger age will do nothing to make it safer. Quite the contrary. We would expect college presidents to know better.