THE ISSUE: Pearce-Ford Tower is now an all-female dorm much to the dismay of many female students who desired a coed dorm or were hoping to avoid climbing down 26 floors during any mandatory fire drills.

OUR STANCE: WKU made a brilliant decision by changing PFT to an all-female dorm, effectively ending the stigma the dorm has held for years as being dangerous or somehow prone to accidents and unruly students. However, it has left some portion of the student body unhappy in its wake. Well, it’s still standing, so there’s that.

When WKU announced last fall that it would be changing PFT to an all-female dorm, there was a fairly negative response among students.

But here at the Herald, we’d like to offer a small round of applause to WKU, regardless of how popular or unpopular that decision may be among current students.

Let’s call a spade a spade here. That dorm has been the thorn in WKU’s side since it became coed.

And WKU has been pretty open about the necessity for its change.

When interviewed last fall about the change in PFT, Brian Kuster, the executive director of Housing and Residence Life, openly acknowledged PFT’s stigma as the driving force for the change.

“When they thought of Pearce Ford, they thought of negative things and the building really is, quite honestly, the nicest building we have on campus today,” Kuster said. “We wanted to get a fresh start and the best way to do that is to change the population in that building.”

It’s not as if the administration hadn’t already tried every trick in the book to change its reputation of “negative things.”

They released a slew of statistics proving that PFT was as safe as anywhere on campus. The Herald even wrote a front-cover story on this very issue in 2010 called “Tales of the Tower” which verified WKU’s claims.

And we mustn’t forget the $15 million WKU sunk into renovating PFT either.

So after all that effort, is anyone particularly shocked that this happened?

The only other option would’ve been to demolish the building altogether or hope it burnt down while no one was inside the dorm.

But the aftermath is still quite ugly for many current students.

Even if we move past the thought of having 860 girls sharing a living space, there’s still the fact that non-honors freshman have no coed living option under this new dorm system.

Girls living in PFT can’t have male guests in their dorm after a certain time and, frankly, that sucks.

Plus, because of WKU’s current policy requiring all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus, students wishing to avoid that kind of restriction have no choice.

So congratulations to WKU on what might be its best public relations decision made in the past 10 years.

But our deepest, most sincere condolences to all those poor, poor girls.

This editorial represents the majority opinion of the Herald’s 9-member editorial board.