This summer, more than 100 college presidents and chancellors started a campaign known as the Amethyst Initiative, asking lawmakers to lower the nation’s minimum drinking age to 18 to stem an epidemic of binge drinking on campuses.

In 1984, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act established the current age of 21 and threatened states that failed to adopt it with the loss of federal highway funds.

The Amethyst Initiative’s push to roll back the drinking age – the most misbegotten idea to come from academia since “political correctness” in the 1970s – promotes a change that is unlikely to reduce collegiate alcohol abuse and attendant injuries or deaths, but is likely, based on statistical experience, to increase traffic fatalities among 18, 19 and 20 year olds.

The campaign’s rationale goes something like this: College students drink to excess, because alcohol is “forbidden fruit.” If they are treated like adults, instead of children, they’re more likely to drink responsibly. Besides, they can vote and fight in the armed forces at 18. Why is drinking different?

The bottom line, say colleges, is the current limit doesn’t work, and, if it’s strictly enforced within their environs, students will go off campus to imbibe. As befits academics, of course, their argument is phrased in words weightier than a doctoral dissertation.

The organization’s published statement notes that mandated abstinence “has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.”

Thankfully, none of Maine’s colleges have signed onto this campaign, but Duke, Ohio State, Dartmouth, Middlebury and Tufts are among the heavyweights that have.

There’s nothing new about bad behavior in higher education. It’s been around as long as there have been colleges and universities. Intellectual ferment, combined with youthful exuberance, sexual energy and adolescent rebelliousness, have led to student unrest, drunkenness and mayhem, and caused societal headaches for centuries.

In 1231, for instance, King Henry III wrote to the sheriffs of the shires of Oxford and Cambridge, instructing them to cooperate with the local bishop and chancellor of each university to repress “rebellious and incorrigible” students.

In the post-World War I era, co-ed practices of petting, drinking gin from hip flasks, and dancing cheek to cheek scandalized the forces of conventional morality. The late 1960s ushered an era of strident political protests, expressed through innumerable marches, sit-ins, class boycotts and the occasional takeover of university administrative offices.

With spasms of student misbehavior and lawbreaking an integral part of the collegiate rite of passage, educators have a limited number of options.

They can try to teach students to act like grown-ups – a hit-or-miss proposition at best. They can enforce proper behavior with the only tools available to them: suspension or expulsion. Or they can turn a blind eye to the problem.

In the tumult of the late 1960s, college presidents began opting for the last alternative, largely for self-serving reasons. It was easier than coping with the public relations nightmare of student rebellion.

In 1969, while a student at Georgetown University, I watched a handful of radical members of Students for a Democratic Society (“SDS”) disrupt a campus speech by San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto.

Angered by Alioto’s tough stance against student disorder. the SDSers stormed the podium and grabbed the microphone as he started to address a packed auditorium. Pandemonium ensued, Alioto was hustled out of the hall, and, as far as I know, the students responsible for the incident were never punished.

Nowadays, administrators are likely less worried about provoking student uprisings than alienating alumni donors.

It takes a lot of money to run a college or university. In addition to being centers of learning and research, they are oases of luxury. Typically, they maintain a large infrastructure for athletics, housing, dining, performing arts and recreation. Faculty members, administrators and coaches are numerous and well compensated.

As a result, the cost of a college education, particularly a private one, has risen faster than inflation for decades. Tuition, room and board averages over $32,000 a year at a private school, and can cost north of $50,000 at an Ivy League or other elite college.

To lose a student to expulsion, therefore, represents an economic blow to an institution.

Colleges also take great pains to cultivate alumni, the prime donors for their endowment funds, which can amount to hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at prestigious institutions. It’s traditional for these same alumni to send sons and daughters to their alma mater, and some colleges give admission preferment to such children.

If there’s a sure way to lose alumni donors, it’s by expelling their children for violating college rules or breaking laws like the drinking age.

So, if you’re a college president or university chancellor, what do you do to combat drinking and alcohol abuse on campus – instruct staff to crack down, or ask legislators to redefine underage drinking to exempt virtually all college students from the limit?

It doesn’t take a doctoral dissertation to figure out the answer to that question.

Elliott L. Epstein, a local attorney, is founder and board president of Museum L-A and an adjunct history instructor at Central Maine Community College. He can be reached at [email protected]