Why is Student Government so emphatic about taking away our rights? The organization’s website claims to be “a clearinghouse for concerns from students,” but it has deteriorated into an undergraduate K Street with students trying to impose their wills onto the rest of us.
As H.L . Mencken once put it, “The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
The “Smoking Policy Reformation Act” was introduced in early February by two freshmen, Sean Pavia and Joshua Teder . The legislation—better deemed the “How to Not Make Any Friends in Your First Year of College Act”—intended to prohibit smoking at N.C . State. Yes, this is a proposed smoking ban on a land-grant university’s campus.
The bill was magically referred to the same committee on which Teder sits, but luckily the committee voted to table the bill until March 14th due to its illegality under state law.
And now the bill’s sponsors have also advocated changing how the bill is worded in order to enforce a 100-foot ban. This would most likely be illegal as well. Nonetheless, whether we end up with a 100-foot ban or the current 25-foot ban, these so-called senators cannot be serious when they say that the bill will lead to a healthier campus.
It will only lead to strained relations between students and campus police, the latter of which will no longer be trusted with even the smallest details lest we unknowingly break an already incomprehensible student conduct code.
The senators’ Wikipedia-based research envies only the PowerPoint slides created by career politicians in D.C . Let’s critique a few of the pair’s arguments.
Perhaps the most outrageous misrepresentation in the bill is that Pennsylvania State University spends $150,000 per year in order to clean up cigarette litter. This random number was taken from one remark made in a news brief over an entire decade ago, and the man who made the statement was referring to how much the University paid landscapers in general, not how much it spent picking up cigarette butts.
It’s almost like taking our University’s entire cafeteria budget and claiming we pay that much for pancakes alone.
If cigarette litter were a real problem on our campus, surely the senators would have included those relevant statistics rather than ones describing the state of a school located hundreds of miles away during Bill Clinton’s tenure in office, no?
Teder and Pavia point to smoking prohibitions at other campuses, but they don’t mention whether these experiments were successful. I checked. The University of New Mexico’s website, for example, states, “It’s easy to tell that UNM isn’t completely smoke-free [because] many smokers still choose to ignore the designated areas.”
They then bring up a failed attempt by Student Government to repeal smoking restrictions in 2008 but once again forget to mention that the bill was defeated by only four votes. To politicians, this is democracy. To the common man, this is mob rule.
Should we imprint a large “CS” on all cigarette smokers? According to a report published by the University last year, North Carolina “had cash receipts from tobacco of $746 million in 2009,” nearly double the runner-up state. Why bite the hand that feeds us? The last thing the University needs to do—especially during this fragile economy—is take North Carolina cash crop and ostracize the industry into oblivion.
If anything, we should encourage students to follow the rule upon which civilization has flourished: When someone neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg… well, leave them alone. A generation of upcoming Founding Fathers is all we need.
My suggestion: ignore what Student Government says. Do what you want.
They’re just blowing smoke.
