Soon there will be no more lighting up anywhere at Northeastern University.
Credit: Nicolaus Czarnecki/METRO
Put down those butts, Northeastern University students and staff.
The university formally announced Tuesday that it will be among the first colleges in the Boston area to implement a campus-wide ban on smoking.
While other Greater Boston colleges ban smoking within so many feet of a building or just on their medical campuses, Northeastern’s new policy bans smoking on all campus grounds.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm and I think people basically understand this is a public health service,” said Terry Fulmer, dead of the university’s Bouve College of Health Sciences. Fulmer also co-chaired the 10-person committee that examined instituting a smoke-free campus policy.
Fulmer said the committee solicited feedback from students and university community members through various social media outlets, blogs and during open meetings.
When asked about enforcing the ban, which starts when fall classes begin, Fulmer said anyone found smoking on campus would be “encouraged to stop and reminded” about the ban. “We don’t have any resona to belive they wont” stop,” she said.
The school has started new cessation programs to help those who want to quit as part of the transition.
Fulmer said that when the school has asked students to self report, 14 percent said they smoked within the last month.
Similar proposals at Boston College have failed. However, similar bans are in place at Harvard’s medical campus, Boston University Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which will go tobacco free later this year.
Follow Michael Naughton on Twitter @metrobosmike.
