In the healthy tradition of Canada, Ireland, and a growing number of American cities, most Britons are now counting down the weeks until their workplaces and restaurants become smoke-free. But how long will it be until universities take a tobacco leaf from their international counterparts' policy books and follow suit with campus-wide smoking bans?
In the United States, at least 40 institutions of higher learning have recently gone smoke-free, according to an organisation calling itself Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights. The organisation has also published a helpful primer for other campuses wishing to follow suit. It proposes banning smoking within private student accommodation and removing cigarettes from campus shops.
In a country with more than 4,000 degree-granting institutions, a total of 40 bans is relatively microscopic, of course, but then so was the number of jurisdictions flirting with similar policies only a decade ago.
Elsewhere in the international academic world, campus-wide bans have been enacted or are in process at some institutions in Singapore, Canada and Australia.
Fiji's flagship University of the South Pacific, whose last vice-chancellor died of lung cancer, has also shunted its puffing students out behind the bike shed. And the University of Newcastle banned smoking throughout from the beginning of the year.
But not every academic observer is buying into the smokefree air of good feeling. Responding to a rant by the blogger Fibrodenial, one online contributor from an unnamed liberal arts college asks how long it might be until campuses start setting aside designated areas for fat people, ugly people, people with braces, and even a section for single women with more than one cat.
Still, things could be worse. Today in some parts of the United States, even death row inmates are sometimes denied a cigarette ahead of their scheduled deaths, in the interests of promoting a smoke-free execution environment.
The situation spurred Canadian scholar Justin E. H. Smith, a philosophy lecturer at Concordia University, Montréal, and contributor to the dependably hard-hitting Counterpunch.org, to write:
I hate capital punishment. It's revolting, and I'm kept awake at night knowing that it's going on. But I hate so much more the knowledge that a condemned man is denied his right to smoke, in order that his executioners may pretend that what is taking place is a normal part of the smooth and sterile procedure-following of a healthy and modern institution. If it's going to happen, blood needs to splatter, the heavens might do their part by trembling a bit, and all those complicit deserve at least a bit of second-hand smoke in their eyes.
Even the most anti-smoking academic type, enthused by anti-smoking measures abroad but possessed of a working social conscience, would surely cough loudly in agreement.
