Editorial: The Citadel should stick to its principles. Don’t water down tobacco ban. | Editorials
In rolling out its campuswide ban on tobacco products six years ago, The Citadel noted that it was “committed to providing a safe and healthy learning and working environment for our cadets, students, faculty, staff and visitors and recognizes that tobacco use in any form is a significant health hazard.”
That language remains on the school’s website — at least for a bit longer — along with a link to a letter “commending The Citadel’s new tobacco-free policy.” The July 13, 2016, letter from the director of the Hollings Cancer Center at MUSC called the decision “conducive with The Citadel’s overall mission to provide a positive learning environment for educating the next generation of future leaders.”
The website also includes a list of a few of the horribles of tobacco use, among them “smokers die 13 to 14 years earlier than nonsmokers,” “Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women in the United States,” “Smoking causes many other types of cancer, including cancers of the throat, mouth, nasal cavity, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, kidney, bladder, and cervix, as well as acute myeloid leukemia” and “Smokeless tobacco contains 28 cancer-causing agents.”
None of that has changed since the policy took effect on July 1, 2016.
But as The Post and Courier’s Thomas Novelly reports, The Citadel is in the process of changing its policy, to allow cadets and employees to follow the example of Citadel President Glenn M. Walters, whom a spokesman said has been seen frequently on campus using smokeless tobacco.
It’s true that society has a greater interest in protecting innocent victims than in protecting us from ourselves — that is, in protecting nonsmokers from secondary smoke as opposed to protecting tobacco users from sickening themselves through vaping or smokeless tobacco.
But unlike cities, counties and states, colleges have more to consider than just protecting bystanders, or holding down tobacco-related medical costs. They have to consider their mission to turn out well-rounded adults; they have to recognize that people who choose to enroll in a college are signing up for more than just an academic education, and that colleges have an obligation to offer more.
That’s why we’ve seen a rise in completely tobacco-free college campuses — the CDC counted 63 in South Carolina in 2018, and more than 1,700 nationally — and it’s an idea that would seem to go doubly for The Citadel, where parents expect that their children will have far less freedom than at other colleges.
A spokesman told Mr. Novelly that cadets started lobbying for the change after a 2019 federal law raised the age to legally purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21. We don’t question the accuracy of that statement, since we’re talking about 18- to 21-year-olds, who aren’t always the most logical thinkers. But the folks running The Citadel are supposed to be able to think more clearly, and if anything, that change would argue for implementing (or keeping) a tobacco ban, not watering it down, in order to discourage 18-, 19- and 20-year-old cadets from breaking the law.
If The Citadel buys the argument that it’s not treating students like adults — or that it needs to let the students make the rules — we’re sure the cadets could come up with lots of other rules and restrictions to sweep away, so they can make their own decisions.
The Citadel’s policy allows the president to “permit limited exceptions” to the tobacco-free policy, as he apparently has done for himself. And we can understand why cadets would be put off by his “do as I say, not as I do” approach to tobacco.
But the way to fix that disconnect isn’t to water down a policy that encourages cadets to break dangerous addictions they formed even before they arrived on campus — a policy that will in fact save lives. It’s for President Walters to obey the policy. At least in public.