The Rocket

Issue date: 11/2/07 Section: Opinion

It has become increasingly apparent to me that our university is turning into the Bush administration. It is unfortunate when the big issues of the day on campus are smoking and cell phone use in the library.

Not only are they minor blips in the large scheme of university issues, they're simply serving to distract us from the bigger issues.

We are living in a culture in America that glorifies feel-good legislation, as can be seen by the action that the State House of Representatives is taking to ban smoking in public places. "Well, we might not have been able to balance the budget, but we sure did stick it to those smokers," is not the kind of statement I want to hear from my government.

Smokers are easy to condemn, however. They're great scapegoats to have. Kind of like gays. There might be a war going on in Iraq that's going nowhere fast, there might be a huge national deficit, oil prices might be sky-high, but the gays want to get married, and that makes us uncomfortable.

So we do what makes the brain dead, or just plain ignorant, happy. We persecute the people that aren't a huge threat to us, and everyone claps and cheers and everything is good in the world.

I feel as if we are simply burying our heads in the sand. Title IX lawsuits regarding equal opportunity in women's athletics aren't exactly good publicity, I suppose, but banning smoking on the campus is and RFID tags are. Easy tasks, accomplishable, and they're good PR. It might distract us from the real issues, but we shouldn't let it.

On a list of important things, smoking is down at the bottom, somewhere near "odiferous, overpowering perfume" and "visually unattractive carpet."

And while the skies are filling up with pollution due to the car exhaust (which is only exacerbated on SRU's campus because people have to drive around and around for minutes on end to find the elusive parking spots), as well as the looming industrial smokestack by the field house, we can all breathe easier because smokers aren't hanging around Spotts.

Personally, I tend to think that a student going to class when they're ill because of their professors' ridiculous, penalizing attendance policies is more of a health risk than walking by a few smokers.

But, no, it's a great time to be at the Rock. Enrollment is up; Students are filling up the classrooms, literally, that is. It's a great time to be at the Rock because I can hide in the auditorium classes with 150 students in them and still pass, confident that my degree has value to employers.

My paperwork can be mishandled in the Admissions Office, even lost, and it can be a week before registration and the Honors Program still won't have the date of my registration in the computers correctly, but I can confidently say that banning smoking on campus will definitely enhance my Slippery Rock University experience.

Now, I don't want this to be construed as an attack on all of the professors here.

I've had a lot of good professors here, and I've had a few that I wasn't fond of, but that's just the way it is. Slippery Rock University's issues lie with the higher-ups, not the instructors.

Overall, I feel that the university will be much better off if the big issues of the day are confronted and if we stop waiting to fix things until people call us on them. As of now, though, it's not a great time to be at the Rock, it's a marginally OK time.

We need to get our acts together and stop focusing on asinine issues and truly look at the problems at hand. I think that we can make things better for everyone.

In the meantime, however, cigarette smoke is the least of our worries.

Lisbeth Wells-Pratt is a freshman creative writing major and a regular contributor to The Rocket.

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