Associated Students recently published the results of an online survey guaging student opinion regarding on-campus tobacco use. The survey included input from roughly five percent of the student population and portrayed a student body overwhelmingly populated by nonsmokers. According to the survey results, approximately 82 percent of the student body doesn’t smoke, and 65 percent support a campus-wide smoking ban. It will be presented at the A.S. council meeting this afternoon.
The survey was conducted online using SurveyMonkey. Associated Students found participants using an all-student email, social media and direct outreach by student organizations and college councils sitting on A.S. With more than 1,470 participants, this is the most participated-in survey in A.S. history.
Approximately 42 percent of students said they didn’t feel their health was being affected by on-campus smoking, compared to 38.2 percent who claimed it did, yet a majority of those surveyed supported a complete on-campus smoking ban.
A.S. Vice President of University Affairs Matt Cecil previously stated he would be in favor of simply relocating one or two smoking zones responsible for a majority of the complaints A.S. and the university received. However, surveyed students opposed this potential solution 49 to 36 percent. Cecil has now realigned his stance regarding the issue to reflect the student opinion revealed by the survey.
“Everyone always has their personal opinions when it comes to things, but when it comes to voting at the university senate, I will be voting in favor of a smoke-free campus, because 65 percent of the (surveyed) student population did vote that they would do it,” Cecil said.
Cecil added that, out of approximately 400 student complaints A.S. received with the survey, about 200 participants stated they would like to see smoking completely banned from campus.
Seventy-six percent of surveyed smokers said they would continue to smoke on campus regardless of the ban,* which is relevant because the university and the SDSU Police Department may not have the resources to enforce a campus-wide ban. One of the biggest complaints about the current “designated zones” policy is that students continue to smoke on campus outside of the zones, because enforcement of the policy by the police has been limited.
Public Health professor Thomas Novotny said that while a campus-wide smoking ban would be enforced similarly to the current policy, self-enforcing and peer-enforcing can be an effective way to encourage people to follow campus policy.
“Every time I see somebody smoking, I go up to them and I say, ‘Sorry, this isn’t a smoking area, and you shouldn’t be doing this,’” Novotny said. “And every time I do that, they thank me and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t think it’ll be that hard to enforce.”
Novotny created an initiative on Earth Day four years ago, shortly after the creation of the designated smoking zones policy, which organized students, faculty and community members to pick up cigarette butts around campus. The number of volunteers he gathers usually ranges from 40 to 50 people. Each year, participants collect thousands of cigarette butts, enough to fill the large, plastic tubes that can be found in the inner archway of Hepner Hall. For this reason, Novotny said the designated-zones policy is ineffective, and that a smoke-free campus would be beneficial for two key reasons.
“First, it will reduce the butt waste on campus for sure, and two, it will change the social norm,” Novotny said. “And as an institution of higher learning, we really want to get people’s lifestyles and their professional potentials maximized, and smoking doesn’t have any place in that.”
This ongoing debate for a campus-wide smoking ban was sparked when the University of California system banned smoking from all 10 of its campuses. In addition to being a point of concern by the University Affairs Board, the University Senate is expected to weigh in on the debate during its April meeting. If the senate approves, the ban would move on to the office of SDSU President Elliot Hirshman, who would then be expected to negotiate with campus unions prior to deciding whether to implement it as a campus policy.
*: We were asked to clarify how we reached this fact, because it wasn’t explicitly stated in the survey data. Question Four asked, “If smoking was banned on-campus, would you continue to smoke regardless of the ban?” 196 students responded “yes,” 59 answered “no” and 1,215 answered “This does not apply to me / I don’t smoke.” We excluded the non-smoking respondents and calculated the figure using the remaining 255 students. [196/(196+59)=0.768]
