Smoking ban ignites debate

The Columbia College Student Council wants to know: what are you smoking?

Mostly council insiders turned out to the CCSC’s Tuesday night town hall meeting, where the room talked smoking bans and campus space.

With midterms ahead and the semester midpoint approaching, CCSC executive board members presented what have been the defining issues of their first two months to a room of faces familiar to weekly meetings, now given an informal forum to spitball.

Vice president of policy Sarah Weiss, CC’10, said they are working to pull in wider campus opinion on the smoking ban—and are hoping for relatively quick turnaround. Weiss, as well as CCSC president Sue Yang, CC’10, are currently members of the tobacco workgroup, which proposed an all-campus ban on smoking last year.

The tobacco workgroup can be traced back to a request last year from the central administration to reassess tobacco usage on campus and make sure Columbia was upholding New York state smoking laws. The group, which included deans, administrators, representatives from Lerner, dining, housing, and health services—as well as last year’s CCSC VP of policy—eventually turned to the question of whether or not it was time to investigate new policies for the campus. Smoking had already been banned at the Columbia University Medical Center and on the Barnard College campus, and more universities across the country had been telling their campus dwellers to put out their cigarettes.

The workgroup administered a survey to students asking their opinions on a potential ban, and they received more positive than negative reaction to the idea. But the survey, Weiss said, was self-selecting and saw extremely low turnout—perhaps it was not a reliable indicator of larger student opinion, and a rather small pool to build the ban on.

Now, CCSC is prioritizing a more comprehensive poll to the student body as the four undergraduate councils and graduate school representatives meet to discuss stage two. According to Weiss, the plan is to poll 1400 students who will be asked their thoughts on the possible ban. Once the survey is up and running, Yang said they expected a three to four week turnaround of results.

But Weiss pointed out that even a more encompassing poll would still be missing key voices—University faculty, staff, workers, and community members also use the campus, and they are among the constituencies that would not be represented in such a survey. Yang also said a ban would save the University costs in cleaning up scattered cigarette butts, though Weiss said she thought the cost involved may not be enough to be considered significant. It is also unclear who would be enforcing a ban, and whether that would require more resources. Also, a new set of consequences may have to be developed for smoking discipline.

The decision, University President Lee Bollinger said at a recent University Senate meeting that Yang attended, will ultimately rest with the central administration. In an interview with Spectator, University President Lee Bollinger said he is “waiting for the issue to unfold.” As for the process, “this comes down to University policy,” he said. “My sense is that this [a smoking ban proposal] is something I would take to the Trustees for approval.”

Though he hesitated to share his opinion, Bollinger remarked, “I go into this with a fairly strong feeling that we shouldn’t have smoking on campus.” Still, he said he won’t force his opinion on Columbia and would wait to see the poll results. “This is a process,” he joked. “This is health care reform.”

Yang said that they would have to be realistic about how much say they were going to have in the outcome, and that their best arsenal was an accurate poll. Still, the final decision doesn’t rest on the results of the survey, she reminded the council.

The council also addressed continuing campus space issues, as Activities Board at Columbia and Student Governing Board chairs Scott St. Marie and Devora Aharon, both CC ’10, spoke of their attempts to solicit student feedback for the use of newly opened spaces in Broadway and Schapiro. They will eventually make a proposal to the administration regarding what students want those spaces to become. ABC and SGB are also working on separate proposals to allow students easier access to booking space at Lerner—students do not technically have access to space in the for-profit center during business days during the week.

In the mean time, information is power on a cramped campus—Aharon and St. Marie suggested better online tracking of campus space and its real-time use.

Tags: News, Alix Pianin, CCSC, smoking ban