Smoke but No Fire
Settling into a corner table at Jojo’s, I open my laptop and start typing. My closest friend at Yale sits across from me with her iced latte and asks what homework I’m doing. This, I’ve noticed, is how we bond at Yale: not just by getting coffee, but by sharing our academic sufferings.
I tell her that, actually, I’m researching Tobacco-Free Yale. She laughs — she’s a smoker, herself — and waits to find out what the hell that is and if I’m going to try and convince her to give up the habit.
“Let’s clear the air” is no longer just an opening for an uncomfortable confession. Now, thanks to the Yale administration, it’s a slogan for a health campaign that President Peter Salovey calls “a journey to become a tobacco-free campus.”
In the Information Age, it’s nearly impossible to be oblivious to the dangers of tobacco: its direct link to various cancers is common knowledge, and nicotine’s addictive quality makes quitting a challenge. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the habit claims the lives of nearly 500,000 Americans each year, so it’s no surprise that Yale aims to eradicate the practice on its campus.
By introducing the Tobacco-Free Yale initiative as a campaign, rather than simply banning smoking, it’s clear that Yale was hoping to engage its student body in the process. But the administration’s sudden desire to get involved was woefully off-target.
In the fall of 2015, Yale’s campus was steeped in media attention over two controversies, both of which demanded direct and immediate response from the administration. What was then Calhoun College, named for the vehement 19th-century white supremacist, was the focus of numerous protests as students pushed for its renaming. Then, in October of that year, one Yale professor sent out an email encouraging students to dress up as they pleased for Halloween, regardless of potential cultural or racial offensiveness. This provoked additional widespread backlash and further magnified tensions on campus.
In the midst of all this commotion, as students grew increasingly frustrated over the administration’s lack of (appropriate) action, Tobacco-Free Yale was launched. Whether it was intended to be a demonstration of the administration’s interest in campus affairs or a simple attempt to divert attention from two considerably more precarious issues, the campaign instantly fell flat.
In November 2015, the month of the campaign’s launch, Yale held a kickoff event at the Schwarzman Center offering refreshments and free water bottles. Even if you missed the kickoff event, you may have seen the laminated posters around campus oh-so-cleverly imploring us to “clear the air.” But of all the students I spoke to, only about half of them even knew what the campaign was.
On the Tobacco-Free Yale website, there’s a link to the campaign’s Facebook page. Upon opening the page, the viewer is greeted by the header photo, which is a collage of “No Smoking” signs boldly declaring that “YALE UNIVERSITY IS TOBACCO FREE.” The page has a whopping total of 306 likes — less than two percent of Yale’s combined student and faculty population.
This publicity deficit is stark when we consider the wealth of resources at Tobacco-Free Yale’s disposal. The Yale Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science offered grants ranging from $25,000 to $75,000 for “projects that study tobacco additives and modified risk tobacco products,” according to the first article posted on the Tobacco-Free Yale website in October 2015.
But given the Tobacco-Free Yale campaign’s failure to gain traction among the student body, one may speculate whether Yale’s tobacco scene is prevalent enough to warrant this degree of expenditure or if these funds could have been allocated to more relevant, student-advocated projects. It’s not hard to conjure up a list of possibilities for how this kind of money could be spent — subsidizing textbooks or printing services, for example.
Tobacco-Free Yale can pour university resources into kickoff events and free food, but at the end of the day, how is this mass tobacco sweep being enforced? In a YDN article following the launch event, Yale’s Deputy Vice President for Human Resources and Administration, Janet Lindner, is quoted as having called the campaign an “outreach,” meaning that it will not involve “smoking police.” I approached a couple of Yale Security officers with the hope of getting a sense of how much enforcement there is, if any, when it comes to reducing tobacco use on campus. When I asked if they would ever ask a student or faculty member to put out their cigarette or to move elsewhere, one of them replied, “Would you?” I told him the truth: no, I wouldn’t. He nodded and shrugged. “It’s a hard thing to do.”
In order to get on the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation’s list of smoke- and tobacco-free colleges and universities, either smoking or tobacco must be 100 percent prohibited by the school. This would mean no designated smoking areas, no special exemptions or permissions, and actual enforcement of those rules. But, according to one Yale junior who asked to remain anonymous, it’s easy to smoke anywhere on Yale’s campus (except inside university buildings, as specified by state law).
President Salovey hopes that Yale will “become a model for other universities to emulate,” as he asserts in the Tobacco-Free Yale mission statement. If the university does become totally tobacco-free, it will be the first Ivy League school to do so, although Harvard launched its own efforts to become tobacco-free in 2014. One could argue that there is nothing wrong with wanting to be first, but perhaps this aim fuels further doubt as to the campaign’s motives.
There remains a much simpler explanation for the campaign’s apparent stagnancy. Maybe the fire isn’t catching because there isn’t enough kindling — perhaps tobacco use just isn’t a major issue at Yale.
The campaign’s website provides a plethora of statistics detailing the negative health effects of smoking, the benefits of quitting smoking, and a few statistical points about the smoking scene in colleges. But what does this tell us about our school?
Despite the Tobacco-Free Yale campaign’s enthusiasm for statistics, there has been no data collected on tobacco use at Yale specifically. The state of Connecticut, however, has one of the lowest smoking rates in the United States (13.5 percent in 2016), and its restaurants and bars are by law 100 percent smoke-free. Connecticut is also one of only two states that has not allocated any amount of state funds for the prevention of tobacco use.
Over the summer, incoming first-years are required to complete an online course entitled, “Work Hard, Play Smart: Making Mindful Choices about Alcohol and Other Drugs.” Because nicotine (the primary additive in tobacco) is a drug, tobacco is often lumped in with these categories. And yet, the hour-long interactive session, which is produced by Yale, makes no mention of it. Although the Tobacco-Free Yale campaign outwardly claims student wellness as its top concern, the initiative is not yet influential enough to merit inclusion in this mandatory course on substance use.
Since its inception, Tobacco-Free Yale appears to have had almost no effect on tobacco consumption. Yale views campus tobacco use as a problem extensive enough to have warranted multi-thousand-dollar grants towards its initial research, yet the campaign remains virtually invisible. While any reduction in smoking would undoubtedly be a positive development, Tobacco-Free Yale’s stagnation — especially in light of the campaign’s questionable origins amid campus-wide upheaval — may suggest a loss of interest on the part of Yale’s administration.
