There will also be changes made to the Statement of the Student Rights and Responsibilities Handbook to reflect the new policy, he said.

Winfield said he expects there will be some dissent regarding the policy, but that in two years time, most of the dialogue will be exhausted.

“I think most smokers understand that over the years their behavior is not conducive to nonsmokers, and I suspect that those smokers have come to grips with this to some degree,” he said.

Similar policies have already been implemented on more than 260 college campuses across the country, including the University of California at San Francisco, Indiana University and the University of Iowa, according to the press release.

Karen Whitney, chair of the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis Smoking Policy, said the tobacco-free policy was well received by members of the university community when it was implemented in August 2006.

Whitney, IUPUI’s dean of students, said the smoke-free policy’s compliance with the university’s mission as a health and life sciences campus has allowed the university to be highly successful in its implementation of the regulation.

“It has significantly reduced smoking on university property,” Whitney said. “It has changed and reformed the campus. It is now considered unacceptable to smoke on campus.”

Whitney said while the policy has improved the air quality on campus, there is no evidence that it has reduced the cost of health care for its faculty and staff.

But smoke-free policies are not welcomed by all, including George Koodray, New Jersey state coordinator for The Smoker’s Club of the Citizens Freedom Alliance.

Koodray said banning smoking on college campuses is part of a growing trend to punish people for non-obtrusive, legal behavior.

“We don’t understand why in America the law should penalize people for a practice that’s not offensive to anyone,” Koodray said. “This kind of a ban on the consumption of a legal product doesn’t have adverse affects on anyone. We just can’t understand where this policy is coming from.”

Koodray said everyone, including nonsmokers should be worried about the implementation of this policy, as it could lead to bans on other legal substances.

“A lot of people may not object to this kind of policy because they don’t smoke,” Koodray said. “But down the road, it’s a slippery slope, where we see this taking form to other prohibitions in the future that people don’t approve of but are completely legal.”

Engineering freshman Chris Pike, a smoker, said although he thinks the University shouldn’t be able to conduct students’ personal behavior, it is still a good thing they are trying to implement.

“I guess they can tell us what to do; it’s a public university,” Pike said. “But we pay to go here. They should be giving us some freedoms.”