Editor,
When the no-smoking policy first came out at UNM, I eagerly approached smokers and politely asked them to go to a designated area, and I urged them to give up smoking.
I did so out of concern for the health of young people whom I like and whose future I very much support as a teacher.
After all, my parents both died from health problems related to smoking. I was at one time myself a smoker who quit.
I have survived cancer, and I have been a hospice volunteer who witnessed, time after time, the suffering and death produced by smoking-related illness.
The response was invariably the same from the students I so naively approached— a snarling retort, “F*ck you, assh*le, mind your own G*ddamn business.” Many of these smokers then proceeded to blow smoke in my face, and one even spat on me.
After a few years of persisting despite the abuse, I just gave up. Now I no longer say anything to the growing number of students who have made up their minds that rules are for other people and that they can smoke anywhere they please.
Here’s my point—we have a growing number of students on campus who defy the no-smoking policy and who argue that, because the University doesn’t enforce the policy, they have a right to do what they want.
On the other hand, they argue, if the University were to take stringent measures to curtail tobacco use on campus, then that would oppress them. In exasperation, some Lobo letter writers have said that the University just shouldn’t make any policy or rule it can’t enforce.
This attitude that I have described extends to many other areas of academic life at UNM—plagiarism, class attendance, assignment deadlines—a growing number of students have decided the rules are for other people and not for them, and they will do what they want and will harass anyone who challenges their sense of privilege and entitlement.
This sense of overweening self-focus holds sway in the world beyond the University campus as well, and it threatens our future as a democracy.
It is the consent of the governed to abide by laws, rules and policy that is at the heart of democratic principles.
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When we lose our sense of mutual care for the common good, when we just say, F*ck you, assh*le, I’ll do what I want. I dare you to make me,” then we invite tyranny, because somebody will come along who will do just that and who will use force in the name of maintaining order to make us obey.
James Burbank
UNM faculty
