Even though rival football fans think the University’s campus smells like corn dogs, to Judith Sylvester, the campus smells like cigarettes.Sylvester, mass communication associate professor, founded the Smoking Words campaign to educate students about the dangers of smoking and effective ways to quit smoking in 2001.This year, Sylvester partnered with The Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco Free Living’s Fresh Campus Campaign and is working to create a student organization dedicated to promoting tobacco education at the University. The Fresh Campus Campaign involves 12 other universities all striving to make Louisiana college campuses 100 percent tobacco-free. “Fresh Campus is designed to have students involved,” Sylvester said. “The better thing to do was to form a student organization and brand it more Fresh Campus than Smoking Words, but I want Smoking Words to be behind it. It has to be educational.”With the Fresh Campus/Smoking Words student organization, Sylvester said she wants to promote smoking cessation, education about the harmful effects of smoking relating to beauty and future employment issues and education about the manipulation of tobacco companies to appeal to college students.”I’m hoping students will resent [tobacco companies] enough to not support them,” she said. “A lot of that is awareness … knowing what those triggers are, and tobacco companies will know those traps and understand those patterns, and they will go after whatever appeals they can to pull students into it.”Sylvester said she received a community grant of $17,000 from Tobacco Free Living. She said the grant will cover promotion and advertising expenses. Sylvester said educating students about smoking will be the key to have advocacy in terms of government policies.Sylvester said she already wrote the constitution for Fresh Campus/Smoking Words, but still needs student involvement. She said she and her students will still be involved with anti-smoking activities, such as the Great American Smoke Out in November and Kick Butts Day in March whether they are an official student organization or not.
Herbert Reese, human resource management junior, is signed up to join the Fresh Campus/Smoking Words student organization.”I don’t smoke, so I think it’d be nice if people didn’t smoke around campus,” Reese said. “Smoking is a big deal to me. I hope we can come up with something where we can get students to not smoke on campus.”Sylvester said the students who smoke outside the library entrance, outside Lockett Hall and in walkways cause problems with secondhand smoke and littering of cigarette butts.Sylvester said in spring 2009, 27 percent of University undergraduate students smoked cigarettes. She said the number of smokers increased after Hurricane Katrina because cigarettes act as a form of stress management. “Nicotine is a very difficult addiction to break,” said Kathy Saichuk, Wellness Education coordinator. “It doesn’t matter what age you are. The younger a person becomes addicted to any substance, the more difficult it is to break that addiction.”The University’s policy on smoking states smoking is prohibited within its facilities, including Tiger Stadium.”If it’s more difficult to smoke, you might smoke less,” Saichuk said. “When you change the environment, sometimes you lose interest in things that were part of that environment before. [People] thought stopping smoking in restaurants would hurt business, but it’s shown to help business.”Shannon Carney, general studies junior, said the Fresh Campus/Smoking Words student organization is a good idea if they are aiming to educate students, but trying to make the University smoke-free will not decrease the amount of smokers off campus.Sylvester said she doesn’t blame the smokers for the smoking problem areas, including outside Middleton Library. She said she blames the University for keeping the smoking receptacles right next to the doors.”I’ve asked for [the receptacles] to be removed,” she said. “That’s the thing we can change. We have to stop it some place, and it should be on the LSU campus where we can educate the state and set the examples.”————Contact Morgan Walker Baus at [email protected]