Administration rams ban through

The TCC Board of Trustees just voted yes to a ban on smoking on all campuses.

If the college wants to ban smoking, fine. It has the right to dictate policies on its own campuses. However, the way the policy passed was nefarious.

A five-day online poll was set up for students, faculty and staff to vote whether they supported the proposed smoking ban. There were no notices posted about the proposal or the online poll on any of the campuses.

Dr. Bill Lace, executive assistant to the chancellor, presented figures indicating 60 percent of TCC students and faculty voted yes to the smoking ban. After presenting that number, he clarified that the 60 percent was out of the number of students and faculty that responded to the poll, not 60 percent of the combined students and faculty.

The actual number of people who voted in the poll was 2,691. Out of that, 1,278 respondents were students. That’s only 3 percent of the student population.

Maybe more students would have participated in the decision process if they had been aware of the poll. Unfortunately for them, administrators felt that posting an announcement in CampusCruiser was sufficient notice.

At the board meeting, Lace admitted that Campus-Cruiser was perhaps not the best avenue to get the word out on the poll since many students don’t use it.

Without a direct message from the school, even students who do check their CampusCruiser accounts might not have known about the proposed smoking ban.

Faculty members were kept well-informed of the poll. They received notice to vote via their e-mail accounts. Why would faculty receive an e-mail notification but not students? Perhaps the administration felt more confident faculty would vote the way it wanted.

Also, administrators said the announcement was posted on CampusCruiser from Thursday to Monday, but that Saturday CampusCruiser was down because some of the servers were moved from NE Campus to the Trinity River Campus. This was a scheduled move discussed at the February board meeting with an e-mail notification sent to remind faculty.

Administrators had this information in front of them. They should have been aware that students would not have access to CampusCruiser and, therefore, have one less opportunity to see the announcement.

At the meeting, all the campus presidents supported the ban.

SE President Judith Carrier told the board her campus was practically smoke-free already with only one designated smoking section. She said students and faculty seldom use the designated area. However, after the meeting, a Star-Telegram reporter found students using the smoking area.

The smoking ban goes into effect May 27.

The ban itself is not the issue — the ham-handed way the administration rammed the ban through the Board of Trustees is the issue.

Bad communication, irresponsible information and overzealous administrators got the smoking ban passed, not the support of students.

Published in The Collegian on April 29, 2009.