The College Fix

Smoking of any kind – even if it involves neither tobacco nor smoke – has been banned at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and even adjoining city-owned property, under a new policy that took effect Monday.

Use of tobacco or e-cigarettes is prohibited on university property with the exception of the Treehaven natural resources center in Tomahawk, whose “location and setting” make it necessary to have a “designated area for tobacco use” until fall 2015, the school said.

UW-Stevens Point will try to apply the policy to areas “usually considered unenforceable” like municipal sidewalks, local radio station WSAU reported. Student Health Services Director Jen Sorenson told the station that because “we do the snow removal and the upkeep on sidewalks, it falls under the control” of the school “and therefore can be part of the policy.”

Nick Schultz, a university spokesman, told The College Fix by email the new policy bans “any lighted cigarette, cigars, pipes and hookah products;  any other smoking products such as e-cigarettes;  and any smokeless, spit or spitless, dissolvable or inhaled tobacco products, including dip, chew, snuff or snus.”

In order to help students quit smoking, the university is continuing its support for cessation programs such as support groups, counseling and nicotine patches or gum, WSAU said.

Schultz said e-cigarettes are not considered “to be a safe nicotine-delivery system or smoking-cessation strategy” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency itself says, however, it hasn’t evaluated them for “safety or effectiveness” and it mainly emphasizes possible “adverse effects,” such as kids jumping to tobacco from e-cigarettes.

UW-Stevens Point went through a long process of discussion and votes to endorse the smoking ban, Schultz said.

Seventy percent of “students responding” to a spring 2013 referendum voted for the ban, and a “tobacco-free campus” was the “overwhelming first choice” in a faculty and staff survey last year, Schultz said. The school held three “open forums” a year ago and finally the student government approved the ban, he said.

The process for completely banning all tobacco and e-cigarettes was not unanimous, though. Schultz conceded that the Classified Staff Advisory Council “narrowly” voted against the ban because of “specific wording” concerns. He didn’t elaborate.

The Pointer, the school paper, reported in an October 2012 article that Student Life Issues Director Ryan Specht identified a complete ban as one of five options the university was considering.

Specht, who chaired the Ad Hoc Committee for the Resolution of Tobacco Concerns, said options such as designated smoking zones or a ban on smoking specifically, but not chewing tobacco, were also on the table.

The ban’s approval was once considered a longshot, according to a 2010 article in The Badger-Herald at UW-Madison.

“As an avid anti-smoker, I don’t see any merit for smoking in the workplace, but it becomes very difficult when trying to stop someone from smoking outside because it could be an infringement on individual rights,” Gerry Ring, then the chair of the UW-Stevens Point University Affairs Committee, told The Badger Herald.

College Fix contributor Matt Lamb is a student at Loyola University-Chicago.

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