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Before another stressful day of teaching, music professor Charlotte Mabrey rested on a bench overlooking the Green, her lips encircling the filter of a cigarette as she pensively sucked out the tobacco smoke.

Those walking by don’t notice she’s breaking UNF’s campus policy by smoking too close to covered walkways.

“When I started, we smoked in the classroom,” Mabrey said, reminiscing about her 27 years teaching at UNF.

While Mabrey might be aware of UNF’s smoking policy, many students are not.

The campus-wide policy was revised by the Health Promotions Department in 2005. Smoking is restricted within 25 feet of all buildings, including covered walkways, and enforcement of the policy is community-based, according to UNF policy.

Many students and faculty are still leaving a haze of secondhand smoke around the buildings and covered walkways at UNF, said John Meisburg, a junior communication major.

“I think about this every day walking from Lot 18 to my classes,” Meisburg said. “I have to deal with people smoking everywhere. I don’t feel students should be subjected to second-hand smoke.”

Ian Cooperman, a junior marketing major, turns to tobacco use as a stress reliever but does see his smoking as a problem for others.

“UNF should have a designated area for smoking so that people who don’t smoke won’t have to suffer from secondhand smoke,” Cooperman said.

Used and flattened cigarette butts scattered on the concrete and grass around our campus leave evidence of the policy’s violation.

“Historically it’s been difficult to legislate health behavior,” Assistant Director of Health
Promotions Mike Kennedy said.

Although UNF might seem lax with reinforcing its puffing policies, other universities around Florida have implemented more stringent restrictions.

More than 60 college campuses around the U.S. have smoke-free policies affecting the entire campus, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation.

The University of Florida made an effort to protect its students and faculty from smoking by updating its policies in 2007 to prohibit smoking within 50 feet of all campus buildings.

A UF study conducted in fall 2007 concluded that 10,000 daily and 3.65 million cigarette butts annually were improperly discarded on that campus.

But UF isn’t the only campus in Florida working to reduce tobacco’s effects on college students.

At Florida International University, there is only one designated smoking area on the entire campus as a result of activists’ health awareness campaigns, campus no-smoking policies and smoking interventions with student groups and athletic teams.

The University of California at Berkeley created its smoke-free policy as early as 1990, when 5 percent more American adults smoked than presently.

The university offered employees up to 20 hours of paid leave to participate in smoking cessation programs, which were provided free of charge.

Stacey Mort, sophomore psychology major, often smokes between classes because it helps her wake up, she said.

“I don’t know. I should bring my tape measure next time,” Mort said, when
asked if she was aware she was violating UNF’s policy.

E-mail April Schulhauser at news@unfspinnaker.com.