Editorial: Smoking ban equally unnecessary and opaque

April 25, 2008

Although the topics change superficially from issue to issue, this space in The Maneater always carries essentially the same message.

We inevitably end up pleading for someone to actually listen to students or take our needs into account. Then we wrap up the editorial with a plea for transparency of office. It is equally inevitable that whomever we are addressing will ignore that plea.

But we never thought that one of the few times the administration actually took action on a student request could turn out to be a step too far.

Students have complained in the past about University Hospital employees and other nonstudents loitering around the Pershing Commons area and occupying the picnic tables to smoke.

Because of a policy change last year, hospital employees are forbidden to smoke on hospital property — so many of them venture across the street to get their nicotine fix. Sure, nonstudents using space reserved specifically for students is an irritating problem. But we can’t even begin to justify how the Department of Residential Life decided to resolve the issue: It banned smoking in the Pershing area altogether, except for two small picnic tables in the courtyard.

We’re basically speechless at such an unnecessary step. This is taking a student request and twisting it so much, blowing the problem so far out of proportion, that we are left wondering what thought process, if any, was followed to reach this “solution.”

The appropriate fix to this area is so easily evident.

By giving the hospital workers a good place to go to smoke, the administration could solve the problem with the fewest parties affected possible. But instead, the step they have chosen infringes on basic student rights for no legitimate reason.

In fact, this smoking ban is so egregious, so unasked for, that we can only muse about if it is part of a more opaque grand scheme. And if so, that is inappropriate.

If this limited ban is a covert pilot program to test student reaction to a widespread smoking ban, then just say so. Let us know what’s going on because, quite frankly, we’re exhausted by the sheer effort of lifting the veils of secrecy that seem to be over most things that occur on the administrative end. A campus-wide smoking ban is certainly something that requires further exploration of student opinion on the issue, but not in this way. Instituting a backhanded, under-the-table test of the program under the guise of helping students is a horrible way to go about it.

If this imagined resolution is actually in response to the legitimate concerns that were raised by students about smokers loitering around Pershing, the solution should be significantly less drastic.

Instead of just outright banning smoking in the free-air environment around that area, it would be wiser to install an appropriate area specifically designated for hospital employees to smoke.

Not just a back alley — a table with seating for multiple people to take smoke breaks at once. That way, there will be no temptation for flustered hospital employees to wander over to the greener pastures of campus in order to smoke. And if that plan doesn’t work, and only if it doesn’t, should stricter measures be enacted.

But if there are ulterior motives behind this move, then the only thing we can ask for, again, is transparency.

The administration needs to just be honest if they are considering banning smoking outright all over campus — that policy would affect the daily lives of students to such an extent that it would need a wide array of student opinion gathering devices enacted before it would be implemented. Students should have a say in anything that would ban them from doing something so elemental as choosing to smoke on campus.

So tell us what’s going on, and then ask us how we feel. It’s the right thing to do.

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Editorial: Smoking ban equally unnecessary and opaque

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