When I was a senior in college, after having worked for the Cornell University Police Department for four years, I hosted a town hall meeting to promote and improve the Blue Light Escort Service, a service which most colleges have to give students safe, free late-night walks home by law enforcement or affiliated personnel.
One of the key takeaways of the meeting, as I knew it would be, was that many students were unsure of the relationship of the escort service to enforcement of underage drinking laws: they were scared that if they were drunk underage and called for an escort, they would get in trouble.
This post is, in a sense, about a narrow issue: the effect of the national minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) of 21 on campus law enforcement. More broadly, however, it’s about a specific and often overlooked result of a legal framework that ostensibly-but-not-really makes criminals of the hundreds of thousands of college students who live on their own and are legally considered to be adults, for behavior that virtually all other adults engage in with laws that are virtually but not entirely unenforced.
It’s kind of a weird thing, if you think about it.