What’s a few drinks? That’s a recipe for student rape.

I hope Rolling Stone’s mistake does not deflate efforts to curb collegiate alcohol abuse, because it has become so awful. About 40 percent of college students binge drink, according to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. That means they consumed five or more alcoholic drinks in a row in the previous two weeks. That wasn’t enough to persuade Sullivan to give it any attention in her Nov. 22 statement. A few days later, she finally raised the topic but had no solutions.

This goes beyond colleges. High schools have been my primary interest the past three decades. I have written about scores of them in every part of the country and hung around one in California, one in New York and one in Virginia for three books about high school life. I believe that after families, high schools are our most important institutions for building good character and work habits. Yet their students’ lives are awash in alcohol, and nobody does much about it.