Get Your Butts Out of the Yard

The first thing they teach us summer-school proctors about is tolerance. We will be living and working with students from different regions and different cultures, they tell us. Better check your presuppositions and prejudices at the door. Better become understanding, sympathetic and nonjudgmental, and better do it fast.

Well, I've had enough. I'm about to take an extremely intolerant stance on behavior that is, for many summer-school students, as fundamental as--no, more fundamental than--breathing itself.

I'm about to propose (although not in my official capacity, of course) a ban on smoking in Harvard Yard.

I am fed up--to put it mildly--with students who consider the Yard no more than a giant and exceedingly well-decorated ashtray. I have lost all sympathy with those who insist, between smoke rings, that denying them their prerogative to drag constitutes an infringement on their fundamental rights. I will hear no more talmudic debates on whether the founders of this nation meant to ensure the ability of each and every last citizen to poison themselves as they see fit.

Smoking is not a right. If the founders of this nation had guaranteed an absolute right to smoke, they would have meant it as the same shameless sop to tobacco producers that similar proposals represent today. If people want to make the libertarian argument that consuming cigarettes wherever, whenever and however they please is a form of self-expression essential to their personhood, then it's time for them to get a new personhood. Anyone so addicted to nicotine that he or she can't stand to do without for the length of time it takes them to walk out the Johnston Gate is in no position to talk about autonomy and individual integrity.

After all, banning smoking in the Yard would still leave the rest of the Square--indeed the rest of the known universe--for people to light up. The restaurant where I work offers an entire floor as well as several other tables for smokers' use, as do many other establishments. One could argue that confining smokers to overpriced Square hangouts like mine means effectively limiting the practice to a wealthy elite, but I would respond that those who can afford regular two dollar donations to Phillip Morris et al. should not be crying poverty. And as long as tobacco conglomorates continue shamelessly to target they young, the working class, minorities and women, smoking will remain an equal-opportunity vice.

While banning smoking from the Yard wouldn't cause any undue injustice, it would improve the quality of my life immensely. For example, I would not walk to class every morning over a carpet of the detritus smokers leave behind in the evident assumption that the Cigarette Butt Fairy is coming to pick up after them shortly. My common room would not reek of the smoke that drifts up from the courtyard where I live. I would be able to walk past the Widener steps, the doors of Sever Hall and numerous other areas which are, technically, fed by an oxygenated atmosphere, without my lungs going into screaming shutdown. And everyone who lives, works and tries to study in the Yard will share these benefits.

I've talked to numerous other proctors and students who are sick of having to deal with other peoples' substance abuse. I doubt our complaints, or even this editorial, will come to anything; a single determined protest from the Camel contingent and all of our efforts will go up in, well, you know. But the fact that I've said this will give me a great deal of comfort as I return to my quotidien existence of tolerance, open-mindedness and coughing at other peoples' cloves. It's at least a start.

Emily R. Carrier, summer proctor, is also a Senior Editor of The Crimson.