This morning, while reading the Op-Ed page of the NYT, I came across a guest column by John M. McCardell, Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College in VT. He addresses three issues that he says he was loathe to discuss, in his 12 year tenure as college president, because they are controversial issues that create problems for colleges whose presidents dare to bring up. Now that he is once more a mere professor, he feels more free to take a public position.

The first two, the out-dated tenure system and how to measure quality in instructional performance when selecting a college, you all can read for yourselves. The third has hit very close to home for me.

To lawmakers: the 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law. It is astonishing that college students have thus far acquiesced in so egregious an abridgment of the age of majority. Unfortunately, this acquiescence has taken the form of binge drinking. Campuses have become, depending on the enthusiasm of local law enforcement, either arms of the law or havens from the law.

Neither state is desirable. State legislators, many of whom will admit the law is bad, are held hostage by the denial of federal highway funds if they reduce the drinking age. Our latter-day prohibitionists have driven drinking behind closed doors and underground. This is the hard lesson of prohibition that each generation must relearn. No college president will say that drinking has become less of a problem in the years since the age was raised. Would we expect a student who has been denied access to oil paint to graduate with an ability to paint a portrait in oil? Colleges should be given the chance to educate students, who in all other respects are adults, in the appropriate use of alcohol, within campus boundaries and out in the open.

And please - hold your fire about drunken driving. I am a charter member of Presidents Against Drunk Driving. This has nothing to do with drunken driving. If it did, we'd raise the driving age to 21. That would surely solve the problem.

Thank God! Someone is finally exhibiting an iota of sense on this subject!

I admit it, I have broken the law. I have given my otherwise adult children the opportunity to enjoy cocktails, wine and beer at family dinners when it was served, provided they were not driving, in defiance of the law that forbids them to drink alcoholic beverages until they reach 21. I also allowed my then-16-year-old daughter to sample wine at home before she went to Europe with her foreign language classmates, so she would understand its effects in a familiar place.

Prohibition against drinking among young adults who are deemed responsible enough to marry, serve in the armed forces, sign contracts of all kinds, and vote, is stoopid. Alcohol use is as much about learning how as it is about avoiding its abuse. To hold colleges and universities to bad law inhibits their responsibility to educate -- we can't educate on a subject that is forbidden -- and hamstrings their ability to enforce reasonable regulations, because nobody admits anything is going on.