The board of trustees passed a vote at its Feb. 17 meeting earlier this year to ban smoking on campus.

There are two main problems I have with the whole ban in general.

First of all, according to the ban, smoking on campus is prohibited, but there is nothing to actually stop people from smoking, and secondly, the ban disregards smokers in general. Finally we’ll compare it to other bans on campus.

Smoking may be banned on campus, but if a police officer walks by a smoker, they cannot give them a ticket and if they tell them to stop, there is no consequence for continuing to smoke.

What good does a ban on something, that affects hundreds, if not thousands of students and faculty, do if it does not pose a consequence for users?

Not to mention, the blatant disregard to the rule itself, there are people who still smoke on campus, and it has been about seven months since the approval of the ban.

It wasn’t even an unanimous vote to ban smoking on campus. It was a 3-2 vote for the five board members, and the student trustee added in a fourth vote to ban it.

Although the student trustee vote does not count to the overall vote, that vote just represents the ideas of the Associated Student Organization (ASO).

There aren’t that many smokers on campus, compared to the population of non-smokers, and this ban disregards smokers in general.

What about placing smoking areas on campus? There must have been talks of that, and there were. Yet, the ban goes through, but smoking areas don’t get a second chance, or thought?

Finally, let’s bring up the fact that skating on campus is prohibited, due to the chance of causing accidents. But police officers drive their vehicles on campus, maintenance workers use their carts to get around campus more quickly and yet students riding skateboards causes concern.

My point there is that if we have a legitimate ban as a citable offense on skateboards, with exceptions to other types of vehicles on campus, so why not a ban that issues a ticket, or something similar, if we are going to ban smoking, with exceptions, for example, smoking areas.

The ban isn’t good enough, but I can see that there are ways to improve it, or change it altogether.