Recently student social life, particularly the Greek system and the administrative abrogation of responsibility, has dominated campus discourse. Given the great strides we’ve made, I believe we should engage untried pathways toward greater inclusivity. Initiatives like the Hop Garage Bar or Collis Microbrews have drawn sizable crowds, but the truth is that only students of age — a small fraction — have full access to alcohol. It is likely, however, given the success of open venues where alcohol is served, that should underage partygoers be allowed to imbibe, they would flock to school-administered or public events where those delinquents in fraternities don’t control all of the power and beer. Therefore, I propose that Dartmouth begin lobbying the state of New Hampshire to allow residents to choose either a drinking license or a driving license upon turning 18. The other option is to convince students that you don’t need to be drunk to have fun. I think the former is significantly more likely than the latter.
In 1984, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which mandated that each state raise the drinking age to 21 or suffer cuts in highway funding. By 1989, each of the 50 states agreed that highways were more important than beer. New Hampshire hopped on the no-fun bandwagon in 1985. Of course, this drastically changed schools like Dartmouth, where absolutely no beer has been served to students under 21 since. Weekends such as Green Key bear testament to the overall sobriety of the underage population.
Moving the drinking age to 21 can mostly be attributed to the drunk driving prevalent among young adults. However, raising the drinking age to combat drunk driving only makes sense if people actually stop drinking under the age of 21. Here lies the paradox of collegiate drinking regulation. Many underage students drink. The College and local law enforcement know that many underage students drink. Yet despite this acknowledgement, few steps actually attempt to enforce the laws decided upon in 1985. While raising the drinking age has succeeded in limiting drunk driving nationwide, the costs of forcing alcoholic consumption underground on college campuses are decidedly negative. Higher risk drinking occurs when the only places to imbibe are away from sources of authority. Lowering the drinking age would allow students to move outside private places and into zones administered by the College or public establishments like bars.
The issue of underage drinking plays into campus discourse regarding Greek life. Fraternities have been made into the boogiemen of student culture for many reasons, alcohol distribution forming a key aspect of the case against them. Dartmouth’s administration and Hanover’s public establishments cannot supply alcohol to underage students. Fraternities, as student organizations, technically cannot either, but in reality can and do. People go to fraternities because they are the primary campus drinking venues. People join Greek life partially because it is the largest viable social scene on campus that allows unmitigated drinking. Greek life, as a part of larger collegiate culture, facilitates high-risk alcoholic consumption. Once people join fraternities and sororities they fall prey to Greek life’s patriarchal, heteronormative and cisgender structures. In olden days, students could hold parties in the open unconnected to the problematic fraternities in venues like their residential halls. Indeed, residence halls often boasted better, albeit different scenes than fraternities before the drinking age was raised.
This brings me back to my original point: drinking licenses for those who would rather drink than drive. If a higher drinking age results in many social problems and merely exists to curb drunk driving, it is the responsibility of the smart people who make our laws to find a better way to decrease drunk driving in our nation’s otherwise upstanding youth. Other options include allowing all undergraduate students a lower drinking age, but that reeks of classism and ableism, which are unacceptable. A far more unlikely solution to the problems associated with drinking would be to decrease social reliance on alcohol and the idealization of unhealthy consumption. However, it is more probable that instead we’ll continue to black out in droves in our dorms, beg fraternity brothers for beer and acceptance and blame Dartmouth for our social problems.