Anti-smoking advocates were issued a breath of fresh air yesterday when the Senate Executive Committee voted to hold onto a proposal that could effectively ban tobacco from the campus.
Despite a formal report from a lower committee that recommended the proposal be scrapped because any health benefits of a 100 percent tobacco-free campus “are probably overshadowed by the legal and other issues” of the policy, the executive committee, the senate’s most powerful, kept the proposal from disappearing by asking that it be more thoroughly researched and reconsidered.
Brad Docherty, a senior finance and government and politics major who serves as an undergraduate student senator, led the movement to save the proposal, arguing it deserves fair consideration, which he said it didn’t get from the Campus Affairs Committee. That committee originally considered the proposal.
“It just doesn’t seem like they really examined what seemed like a very professionally prepared report,” Docherty said. “If I wrote all of this and got a one-page answer that says health problems are ‘probably overshadowed by legal issues,’ I’d be pretty upset and disillusioned with the senate system.”
The proposal to ban smoking on the campus was written by an undergraduate non-senator who senate officials have so far declined to name.
Docherty said the committee’s response lacked sufficient research to support their dismissal of the proposal and recommended sending it back. He suggested asking for a more in-depth conclusion, including how or why implementing such a policy would be unfeasible on this campus.
“Cite something that tells me why it’s not possible,” Docherty said. “I don’t like not looking into this because we assume it’s not a real issue.”
Critics of the proposed smoke-free policy said it is too broad an issue to tackle effectively, and the campus is too big to properly enforce the ban.
“This would be very hard to enforce,” history professor and University Senate Chair Ken Holum said. “How would you do it? Would the police write tickets? Would that work? If not, what are they going to do, put people in handcuffs?”
But according to the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, there are 260 universities in the country that have “100-percent smoke free campuses” – no smoking is allowed anywhere inside or outside on the campuses. While most of the listed institutions are community colleges, small colleges or medical schools, other large research institutions such as SUNY Buffalo, the University of Arkansas and Penn State are also smoke-free institutions.
“You can’t say only small colleges and medical schools can do this and that here, at big universities, we want people to smoke and get ill,” music professor and university senator Carmen Balthrop said. “It doesn’t look like they’ve done any research into how this could work. I find it almost insulting how this was dismissed.”
As it is, university policy prohibits all smoking in all buildings on the campus as well as outdoors within 15 feet of entrances, windows or air ducts. And, as a part of an unwritten anti-tobacco policy, the university has not allowed tobacco products to be sold on the campus for more than 15 years.
University senators said before a real decision can be made on extending the university’s smoking policies to create a campus-wide smoke-free zone, more must be known about the nature of the university’s smoking population.
“What would this do? What percentage of people might be affected?” mathematics professor and university senator Denny Gulick said. “These are real questions, and [the committee’s report] is really very data-empty.”
Senate officials said the committee was given the proposal last month, and were “kind of surprised” at the short amount of time it took for them to review and pass judgment on it. All but two senators voted to send the measure back to committee for further research and review – one senator abstained and one senator opposed – on the grounds that more information was needed before they could make an informed decision on whether or not to take a serious look at a campus-wide smoking ban.
Docherty- a non-smoker – said his request for more research was not intended to be a judgment call on the proposal, but rather on how it was handled.
“First, we need to look at if this is right for [this campus] or not, and then you look at the legality,” Docherty said. “Put some credibility behind the probability and make it a certainty.”
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