"Smoking, or non-smoking?" It seems almost a distant memory, the days of walking into restaurants and being asked which section you would like to sit in. Then, within the past decades as the public perception and understanding of smoking has changed, smoking within restaurants was banned and this question became irrelevant. Yet perhaps it's a question some high school seniors/college students now find themselves asking, especially when considering Kutztown University.

Since many of us were young, we were educated on the dangers of smoking. Disease, cancer, pregnancy complications, dental health, the list could go on and on. Some have reported that for each cigarette you smoke it takes seven minutes off of your lifespan. However, we were one of the first generations that widely adopted the notion that smoking wasn't considered to be cool, not just because of what it did to your own health, but because of how negatively it could affect the health of those around you.

And yet, there's hardly a day that goes by where I'm not walking from class to class at Kutztown and I take in a lungful of someone else's smoke. Freshman, seniors, I've even seen professors smoking outside of buildings. And despite the rule of "No Smoking Within 25 Feet of the Hall," I've repeatedly seen people lean up against residence halls to light a cigarette, and then watch their smoke drift up into someone's open window.

Why does this keep happening when people know how bad it is for them? And how bad it is for others? By smoking a cigarette in a public place, especially a college campus, you're negatively affecting not only your own health, but everyone around you as well. I know of fellow classmates with asthma whose asthma attacks can be triggered by cigarette smoke. The effects of secondhand smoke are almost as bad as the effects of regular smoking. It can still cause cancer, heart disease, and weaken immune systems.

This epidemic of smoking in a public university that attempts to pride itself on the safety of it's students must stop. It is simply not a healthy environment for students when they are being forced to walk through smoke clouds every day. By continuing to not be a smoke-free university, Kutztown is enabling it's students to make negative, deadly decisions about their health, and to make those decisions for those around them as well.

I understand the concerns. Kutztown wants to be an accepting place and provide for all of it's students, smokers and non-smokers. But by making the whole campus smoke-acceptable, it harms everyone. If Kutztown won't join the rest of the modern world and become a totally smoke-free campus, at the very least there should be designated smoking areas. Additionally, the "No Smoking Within 25 Feet" should actually be enforced.

If Kutztown doesn't become a smoke-free campus, it will have to deal with the consequences. What good student would want to attend a university where the quality of their health is at a daily risk? And even farther than that, think of the health effects that the students who are subjected to this smoke will deal with later down the line. Even non-smokers can get cancer just by being around smokers, and in Kutztown, being around smokers is unavoidable.

Kutztown, it's time to stop enabling deadly habits in the students who will become the future foundation of our country, the students who you claim to care so much about. Join nearly all the rest of the educated world, truly do what is best for your students, and become a smoke-free campus.