It is rare that The News editorializes on a nonissue on campus, but we find it necessary to provide some commentary on Regents Residential College’s decision to ban smoking within 20 feet of the front doors of the building.
Declaring smoking a nonissue might sound bizarre with campuses like Northern Kentucky and the University of Kentucky voting to go smoke-free in the last few years, in addition to over a thousand colleges across the nation that have rubbed out smoking on campus. But, we feel that focusing on smoking and smoking alone distorts and pushes to the background issues of far greater importance.
We’ve been talking about getting organized and getting angry, about demanding change on campus and about making sure that the administration and the powers that be, whomever they be, make policy in our interest.
Is an anti-smoking policy serving the needs of the vast majority of students who live on campus, in Regents or elsewhere? Certainly one can argue in favor of the health benefits that would be brought about by less smoke being inhaled by the average student, but what cost are we willing to take to endure to make this policy a reality at Murray State?
In 2008, the Staff Congress passed a proposal prohibiting smoking within 100 feet of buildings on campus. Why is that policy not enforced?
The administration has thus far failed to enforce the policy, a pattern in how other campus administrations have handled the smoking issue after officially going smoke-free.
UK had monumental enforcement issues with their own smoking ban, with smokers blatantly disregarding the policy and continuing to act as if there has not been a change on campus to begin with.
The?UK administration has done next to nothing to enforce the policy change either, as an editorial in UK’s newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, notes, “A walk around campus on a given school day would indicate that UK?does not take the enforcement of this policy seriously.”
With the University’s own record of non-enforcement in this area, how can we trust the administration to keep smokers 20 feet away from the front doors of Regents?
If the administration can’t stop smokers from lighting up on the non-smoking side of Faculty Hall, how does it hope to stop them from lighting up elsewhere?
The passage of the policy at Regents will no doubt have an affect on smoking policy across campus, and something we need to consider going forward. Will Murray State go the way of UK and NKU in adopting a smoke-free campus? If so, will the policy be any better enforced than it is on our sister campuses across the Commonwealth?
We have our doubts about these efforts, at least from the standpoint that there are far bigger fish that students should be frying than smoking policy. Whether you are a smoker or not, chances are that if you’re lighting up or walking by those that do, you are, at the end of the day, still students.
There are a lot of things that we as students do not have in common – smoking is one of those things – but the fundamental thing we have in common, what puts us all in the same boat, is that we all pay tuition to attend Murray State and we all expect something out of it.
We are all here to advance ourselves and in doing so, advance the future of every single one of us, of a whole generation of leaders and thinkers and dreamers who will one day shape our communities, our states and our country.
It is in this manner that we feel that pushing the issue of smoking to the wayside is in all our interests, at least for the time being, if we are to organize around common issues like reducing sky-high tuition, like making our campus a better place to live and to learn, like having a greater voice in how decisions are made on campus and in the city on our behalf. The time for determining the future of our campus’ smoking policies might yet come, but right now, we think that the bigger issues provide a sense of urgency that should unite us, not divide us.
The staff editorial is the majority opinion of The Murray State News Editorial Board.