It is less than a month until Ball State University will implement a smoking ban, but many members of the campus community might be living under a veil of ignorance because the administration is not informing everyone.
The Board of Trustees approved a campus-wide smoking restriction on Dec. 14 that would limit smoking to 11 locations on campus. University officials say they have been on schedule with the communication plan, the most noticeable form of which so far has been an e-mail.
Officials say there a major communication push will begin next week, leaving two weeks' time for the university to get the message out. Ball State has already had two months to begin alerting everyone to the change. If the campus community is unaware of all the restrictions before they are implemented, the ban's enforcement will flop.
According to the Smoke-Free Implementation Task Force Report, the university was supposed to begin a communication campaign to alert the campus to the policy change immediately after its approval.
President Jo Ann Gora sent a President's Perspective e-mail in December, but that only reaches faculty and select students.
Kay Bales, vice president of student affairs and task force leader, said administrators met to plan the communication blitz the first week of Spring Semester. Seven weeks later, the administration's best tactic has been one e-mail.
According to the task force report, signs, fliers and information tables are only a few of the more than 20 communication tactics that were supposed to begin, but are still absent.
Tony Proudfoot, associate vice president for marketing and communications, said he thought the remaining four weeks before the policy's implementation was enough time to alert Ball State to the changes.
"We have a lot of things in the pipeline that are being completed as we speak," Proudfoot said. "There's been plenty of campus conversation about [the ban] already."
If the university is going to rely on word-of-mouth to spread the news about the ban, then the administrators better prepare for difficulties enforcing the policy. Actual copies of the implementation policy were only given to administrators and those who sought them out, which means there are about 20,000 people at Ball State without first-hand information about the rules. People cannot adhere to the rules if they do not know what they are.
If the university is not communicating the policy's provisions to those who are expected to enforce it, then it will be difficult for those people to know when to give a smoker a ticket. The task force report defines the policy's enforcers as "all members of the university community," implying department heads and personnel supervisors.
Administrators cannot expect students and employees who smoke to magically know the regulations. Maybe the university could give everybody a copy of the task force report, quiz them on it and those who fail would have a letter sent home to their parents about the ban. Ironically, the university should have already sent a letter home to all students' parents, according to the task force report. Better call home to Mom and Dad.
Ball State has budgeted about $10,000 for the communication tactics it plans to employ. If the university wants to spend the same amount as a small car, then it should at least be able to make as much noise as the car horn and stop sending e-mails that people might not bother to read. It's hard to ignore a car horn.
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