News

Gail Hinchion Mancini

The University’s newly revised smoking policy, which prohibits smoking within 25 feet of the outside of any building, addresses one of the more troublesome challenges for nonsmokers and for the Department of Risk Management, which oversees the policy.

The University began eliminating smoking options with its first campus-wide smoking policy in 1992, and banned smoking inside buildings in 2006. But it had been difficult to identify a satisfactory coexistence between smokers stepping outside to light up, and those who continued to experience their secondhand smoke, explains Mike McCauslin, assistant director of risk management and safety.

Smokers had been discouraged from smoking near open windows or near ventilation. But often in moving to eliminate one problem, another would develop, he explained.

“In Grace Hall, for example, smokers would stand near the ventilation intakes, and the smoke would enter through there. They were asked to move, and did. But there are so many windows and doors, the smoke still came in,” he says. “There was no workable outdoor smoking area near Grace Hall.”

Similarly, staff who stepped out to smoke on service docks often were smoking directly under the ventilation system.

The new policy now is more closely aligned with St. Joseph County’s smoking ban. The University officers approved the updated policy Aug. 26 to incorporate Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification requirements.

Other features of the revised policy ban tobacco advertisements and the sale of cigarettes on campus. The entire policy is posted online at the Office of Human Resources Web site, hr.nd.edu.