This past fall semester, when I first heard about the new Smoke-Free Campus Initiative, I was excited for the change. The thought of walking through campus without being engulfed in someone else’s cloud of smoke was thrilling. Though I’m not asthmatic, second-hand smoke has always made me feel sick. Besides that, I was proud and delighted that my university was seeking to better the health of our students. We all know that smoking is directly linked to lung cancer and it’s a hard addiction to quit. However, living in Alabama, where according to a survey conducted by the CDC 24.3% of adults smoke, I understood that I will have to deal with smokers in one capacity or another.
Nonetheless, when I started to look into the new policy, I didn’t understand why I was now responsible for policing other students and their habits. I realized that the majority of the student body, myself included, would feel uncomfortable approaching students to ask them to stop smoking. This system of holding each other accountable for respecting the smoke-free campus is simply not practical. Once students figured out that that was how the policy worked, things quickly reverted back to how they previously were. The only sustainable change I have seen from this policy are the signs posted which seem to only serve the tour guides that point to them while the parents struggle to read “Smoke Free Campus” through the haze of smoke.
If the university was in fact committed to creating a lasting, effective policy, they should have started by recognizing that our student body has a large portion of people that smoke on campus. Instead of drastically changing the rules, they should have started with having specific smoking areas. It would allow for students to avoid the second-hand smoke and to contain the areas that have fumes instead of having the smoke surprising other students. Implementing smoking areas would have created a more realistic, student-focused policy.
Along with the smoking areas, the University should continue to reach out to students and faculty that smoke to help them quit. Smoking is a hard habit to drop and we need to encourage them to stop. Though the University did hold two QuitSmart sessions last January, they must be continued on a monthly basis so as to offer them to new and transfer students, as well as students that missed out last semester. Additionally, the University must work harder at spreading information about how to get support and stop smoking. If their desired outcome is a healthier campus, reaching out to the student body would be much more effective than waiting for the students to make the decision on their own.
As a campus, being smoke-free is something we should strive to become. But the current rule mocks the students that were finally going to be free of second-hand smoke and fails to encourage students to stop smoking. The abrupt change has done next to nothing to address the issue of smoking. We must work as a campus to put together a different way to create a healthy, inclusive campus environment.
Samantha Rudelich is a junior majoring in business management. Her column runs biweekly on Wednesdays.
