Tobacco ban hinders student rights
Issue date: 4/29/09 Section: Commentary
Last week's issue of The Wire infuriated us in a manner that has not occurred more often than once or twice before in our time here. To our collective surprise and annoyance, we saw that Dean Craig Andrade was quoted as saying that from July 1 onwards, our bookstore would cease to have tobacco available for purchase. This was something that had been hinted at before in an earlier issue of The Wire but had not since been mentioned or discussed. Or so we thought.
We took the initiative and went to the bookstore to get some answers. According to the manager on duty, this was a decision implemented by the school with no input from either the bookstore or the student body as a whole. They were simply informed that the administration had come to this decision and that they were to stop selling tobacco as of July 1st. The problem this causes is that tobacco accounts for the largest profit at the bookstore. The inconvertible fact is, Wheaton has just shut down the single largest revenue maker the bookstore and by connection, Wheaton, has.
This would be bad enough -with- student input, but as above, students were not involved in this decision. We were not consulted as a community, nor was there any information regarding this decision process. In discussions with the manager as well as a source within the Office of Health and Wellness, it has been discovered that this move was taken as a question of image. The school was concerned about the image it had if it sold cigarettes at the bookstore. They were concerned because alumni complained that they had to suffer through the insult of having students buy cigarettes at the bookstore. They were concerned because other schools have banned tobacco and we hadn't.
The fact is we should be concerned with how it looks that we did this. It's not going to stop smokers; CVS is only a short walk away, but it gives off the wrong image. It says that this school refuses to allow us to make our own decisions about a personal health choice. It says that our rights and freedoms aren't an important factor in decision making, but our image as a school is. But our question is: without our right to make our own choices, how will we become the image of Wheaton College that we are asked to be?
Signed by:
Dan Lanctot '11, Alyssa Colby '11, James Thomson-Sakhrani '11
Students Against The Banning of Tobacco at the Bookstore.
We took the initiative and went to the bookstore to get some answers. According to the manager on duty, this was a decision implemented by the school with no input from either the bookstore or the student body as a whole. They were simply informed that the administration had come to this decision and that they were to stop selling tobacco as of July 1st. The problem this causes is that tobacco accounts for the largest profit at the bookstore. The inconvertible fact is, Wheaton has just shut down the single largest revenue maker the bookstore and by connection, Wheaton, has.
This would be bad enough -with- student input, but as above, students were not involved in this decision. We were not consulted as a community, nor was there any information regarding this decision process. In discussions with the manager as well as a source within the Office of Health and Wellness, it has been discovered that this move was taken as a question of image. The school was concerned about the image it had if it sold cigarettes at the bookstore. They were concerned because alumni complained that they had to suffer through the insult of having students buy cigarettes at the bookstore. They were concerned because other schools have banned tobacco and we hadn't.
The fact is we should be concerned with how it looks that we did this. It's not going to stop smokers; CVS is only a short walk away, but it gives off the wrong image. It says that this school refuses to allow us to make our own decisions about a personal health choice. It says that our rights and freedoms aren't an important factor in decision making, but our image as a school is. But our question is: without our right to make our own choices, how will we become the image of Wheaton College that we are asked to be?
Signed by:
Dan Lanctot '11, Alyssa Colby '11, James Thomson-Sakhrani '11
Students Against The Banning of Tobacco at the Bookstore.
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