After announcing a campus-wide smoking ban last week, it remains unclear how Syracuse University will enforce the policy.

Last Tuesday, SU announced a new policy that will go into effect in July 2015, and will phase out the use of tobacco products on campus as part of an effort to promote public health. A draft of the policy was sent to the SU community in an email.

The language of the policy makes clear the reasons and benefits in having a tobacco-free campus. It is also clear on how the policy will be phased in and exactly where it will be applied. The policy is less clear, however, on how it will be enforced.

According to a draft of the policy, members of the SU community will be tasked with enforcement. There is no mention of any Department of Public Safety involvement in the draft.

“Faculty, staff, students, alumni and volunteers are expected to enforce the policy for their facilities and/or sponsored activities,” the draft policy reads.

But Hannah Warren, a public information officer with DPS, said enforcement of the smoking ban will be a joint effort between DPS and the SU community. DPS wants to avoid strict, authoritarian methods for compliance with the policy, Warren said.

“DPS officers will have the same responsibility for enforcement as all students, faculty and staff,” Warren said. “A model in which the department is solely or mainly responsible for policing smokers on campus would not be effective.”

Although DPS was consulted in meetings that discussed the policy, it did not have a major role in writing the language of the draft as it now stands, Warren said. The policy emphasizes a “culture of compliance” where the SU community and DPS will focus on changing the smoking culture and student behavior on campus.

“The goal is to assist the campus in making a cultural change, where smoking is no longer a conscious option for campus community members,” Warren said.

As of Oct. 1, there are at least 1,477 100-percent smoke-free campuses in the United States, according to the for Nonsmokers’ Americans Rights website. Of those 1,477 campuses, 975 are 100-percent tobacco-free and 291 prohibit the use of e-cigarettes anywhere on campus, according to the website.

Washington University in St. Louis, where Chancellor Kent Syverud served as dean of the law school prior to coming to SU, has a smoke-free campus, according to the university’s website. Florida State University, the University of Louisville, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Notre Dame are other Atlantic Coast Conference smoke-free schools.

The University of Michigan, which implemented a similar smoking ban in 2011, relies on a similar community model for enforcement, which has been successful so far, a University of Michigan representative said in an email.

Part of the University of Michigan’s Smoke-Free Initiative trains supervisors and employees to handle situations in which someone is smoking on campus, according to the school’s Smoke-Free Initiative’s website.

“Be respectful and be direct,” the website says. “Make clear that this is an important policy to the university and it is an expectation that everyone adheres to this policy.”

The University of Notre Dame, which is listed as a benchmark school by Bain and Co., a consulting firm that analyzed ways SU can become more efficient and effective, enforces its smoking ban in a similar manner. “All members of the Notre Dame Community, as well as visitors, share in the responsibility of adhering to and enforcing this policy,” its policy says. Notre Dame’s policy was updated in March.

Rachel Friedman, a junior women and gender studies and geography major at SU, said she thinks the smoking ban will not change the smoking culture on campus nor get people to quit. Smokers, she added, will only be pushed off campus.

“I don’t really think it will change the attitudes towards it,” Friedman said. “But a lot of people, from what I’ve seen, already don’t like the smoking on campus so their attitudes don’t need to be changed.”

Friedman said she disagrees with the limited role DPS will play when the smoking ban is first implemented

“I feel like it has to be based on DPS patrolling and writing people up as they see it,” she said. “People will be less likely to do if they think DPS is going to write them up for it.”

Published on November 17, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu