“We want a healthier campus — a campus for students where it’s harder to start smoking,” Winfield said. “We want to create climate of health and well-being, which encourages people to stop smoking.”

MSU Trustee Dianne Byrum said although a campuswide ban has not been discussed since she joined MSU’s Board of Trustees in January, it could be a possibility in the university’s future.

“You take a look at what’s going on nationally and the debate that’s going on about smoking, and universities are following suit,” she said.

U-M’s new policy follows a trend in the U.S. toward smoke-free campuses. The university will join about 304 colleges and universities nationwide that already have implemented smoking bans.

The list of smoke-free campuses now includes Grand Rapids Community College, Hope College and Lansing Community College.

Kinesiology graduate student Carla Fiorenzo said she would be happy to see a similar ban at MSU.

“Smoking sucks and I don’t want to smell it when I walk out of a building,” she said. “No one listens to the stay 25 feet away from the building signs.”

But to anthropology sophomore John White, a ban on smoking represents a restriction on a student’s choice to smoke.

“To make it a completely smoke-free campus means essentially that they are pushing their ideas and ideals onto their students,” White said.

To introduce such a policy at MSU would take both time and community input, Byrum said.

“I don’t envision it as something that would happen overnight at MSU,” she said.

At MSU, 81 percent of students do not smoke and those who do are primarily social smokers who are not addicted, said Rebecca Allen, an alcohol, tobacco and other drugs health educator at Olin Health Center.

For those who have developed a nicotine addiction, banning smoking could lead to more problems, she said.

Students might instead bring the habit into their home, where closer quarters lead to more devastating health conditions than those caused by secondhand smoke or outdoor smoking, she said.

“Before we go to that next step of eliminating smoking entirely, we need to weigh what the benefits and consequences of that are part in terms of putting cigarette smoking in someplace where we know it’s especially harmful,” Allen said.

“I’ve seen no study on smoking that says a ban on smoking gets them to quit.”