My alma mater (“Southern Tech University”), like many schools, is considering a smoking ban on campus. I was thinking as much as a decade ago that this might be the natural extension of the bans in bars and restaurants. Of course, to voice this back then was to be building up strawmen and making slippery slope fallacies and all that jazz. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure back then. I mean, a bar or a restaurant is one thing, but an entire campus of hundreds of of acres? When office campuses started going entirely smoke free, I stopped feeling that I was perhaps paranoid.
I am against the ban, to what I am sure is nobody’s surprise. So is the Student Association. I find it difficult to believe that on a campus that is nearly 500 acres in size that you cannot find places to accommodate smokers. I feel oddly dispassionate about it, though. It will likely happen at some point, it will likely be ignored. Potential compromises may be passed along the way, but even workable compromises will be deemed insufficient.
In the case of Sotech, there are rumors that it is not entirely the school’s choice and that cancer institutes are threatening to stop giving grants to schools that don’t have smoking bans. Which, if it comes down to losing significant amounts of research dollars, I guess I understand.
Rather than objecting on an ideological level, it’s mostly the sense of loss that nags at me. Not the loss of our freedoms, but that being able to smoke on campus provided extraordinarily good social opportunities for me as an undergraduate. The bans around doorways actually just made it better because it got us all clumped together. No smoking on campus and I never meet Dharla (I mention her, but there were others). This is no thing for a lot of people, who instead of going out to smoke might go to the commons area and meet people there. Me being me, I’d probably have stayed in the dorm and not met anybody. At least, my pre-smoking college experience bears that speculation out.
That’s not exactly a defense of smoking in any logical manner. Which is to say, if there weren’t other issues at stake, my introversion would not be justification for inconveniencing other people. And though I have my objections to a lot of the smoking bans, I can’t at all say that it is an altogether bad thing for smokers to make smoking inconvenient. So it’s not a rational reaction. But dang, man, one of my college experiences is about to be consigned to a period piece.
one of my college experiences is about to be consigned to a period piece.
I suspect many of mine already have been, or do the kids still play bong cribbage?
Well, I suppose my pre-college social experience is already a relic. BBS’s, what are those? The Internet mitigates it somewhat, though something was still lost along the way.
“Dude, that’s so tobacco.”
Coming your way in, oh, 15 years.
Well UT decided to be tobacco free:
They essentially drafted this as their reasoning.
Rice is setting up designated smoking areas in order to comply with the same requirement.
Accidentally hit submit. So anyway, what UT is doing doesn’t seem to be required by CPRIT. This is an excuse.
I’d never read the Dharla story before, which is confusing because I was following your independent blog when you wrote it. I’ve a story much like it from my past, too, complete with the dancing, and the song still makes me nostalgic. What was I saying?
Oh, yes. Quite silly for a college to ban smoking completely. In the buildings, I can see that.
But people are going to smoke. Just like they’re going to drink. One thing that bugs me about this is that a smoker in the dorms, who until now has been obliged to step outside the building to smoke, must now find a place out of direct view of the RA or other attendant in the dorm’s lobby to smoke. This raises a safety and crime issue for me.
While men are not immune from attack and rape, it’s particularly young women who are vulnerable to this sort of thing. Sending them out to dark wooded corners to have a cigarette or two only increases that risk, a risk which otherwise would be much lower if they could stand next to the doorways and be visible to someone else while they smoke.
That’s a good point about security. There are security concerns not only for smokers, but for campus police keeping an eye on loiterers. Unless they’re 100% about enforcing the smoking ban whenever they see someone (and I honestly doubt they will be), there is probably going to be more “That guy is smoking” rather than “What is that guy doing there?” (which from a civil liberties standpoint, might be an improvement, depending on how you look at it.)
Anyway, if you give smokers a place to go, you know where they are and you can more easily control their interference with non-smokers. These sorts of bans are, as likely as anything, going to push them onto the sidewalk, so to speak, at best. At worst, they’ll just outnumber enforcement and people will be smoking in a disorderly fashion that is harder than non-smokers to avoid.
Students were allowed to smoke on my undergrad campus.
The big shock was that my campus was wet when I was there (there were on-campus bars and on-campus security was likely to say “Chug it or chuck it” to underage drinkers. Plus it was easy to have alcohol in your room if you were underage.) However, this changed about two or three years ago and a lot of older alumni are upset about the change. Partially because we think it represents bad policy, and partially because it feels like an end to our time on-campus.
Smoking is banned in NUS. I don’t smoke, so I don’t really understand the pain people feel when their spaces are made smoke free.
I do know that when I was in the army, there were lots of designated smoking areas but obtaining compliance was a bitch. And this was in the army. In NUS, even though there is a smoking ban, smokers just go and smoke in discreet places. I suppose this gets the job of keeping those who don’t want to encounter second hand smoke away from it done.