Major issues require deeper thought

Column by Richard Becker

Last week in Memorial Coliseum, environmental activist and attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a clarion call to his audience to stand up and defend our environment from plunderers who would destroy it for profit.

He possessed the detail of a lawyer delivering a closing argument, the poetry of a great orator, and the passion of an activist whose fate is intimately tied to the success or failure of his cause. In short, Kennedy issued a powerful call to arms to people from all points on the political spectrum to make their voices heard in the debate over how best to save our precious environment from destruction.

Kennedy had the courage to do what few people in Kentucky are willing to do: he took a strong and unequivocal stand against mountaintop removal mining. Citing the mounds of data available on the subject, Kennedy made his point clearly. Whenever we defend mountaintop removal specifically and coal generally as the cheapest and safest means of producing energy for our state, we are not only fooling ourselves, we are diverging with reality.

The Specter of Apathy

According to a recent article in “The Nation,” “young adults listed healthcare among their top three issues.” So why is it that UK remains virtually silent on the issue of health insurance reform?

Partially, this pervasive silence is a result of the inherent conservatism of many Kentuckians, the same Kentuckians who comprise much of the student population at this university. More accurately, UK is a school not only conservative in temperament when it is engaged in the issues of the day, but it is a campus deeply apathetic in nature.

This is evident on campus in several areas. Lexington’s downtown, where many of the city’s most popular bars are located, is being virtually destroyed by two of Mayor Jim Newberry’s colossal blunders: the Limestone closure, and the aborted CentrePointe project. Yet where are the student voices rising up in protest against our city government? As usual, they are silent.

UK President Lee Todd has proposed an unenforceable ban on smoking anywhere on UK property, something that one would think the conservative student population would be against, but again, the voices remain chillingly silent. Is this all due to a general apathy among students at UK? One must hope not, but all evidence seems to imply a grain of truth to the notion.

A Solution in search of a problem

Last year, President Todd proposed and successfully passed a ban on all smoking on UK’s campus. If it is not stopped, it will go into effect on Nov. 19 of this year and will apply to all university grounds.

One of the most fundamentally insulting reasons given for the ban is the suggestion that tobacco companies employ predatory marketing to college-aged individuals and that banning smoking on campus would help with students’ strapped budgets. This is an offensive affront to the most basic principles of individual liberty upon which our nation was founded.

I employ hyperbole here not to grandstand, but to make a point: college students, and all adults, should be permitted to spend their money when, where, and on what they want, without interference from a government institution such as UK, which seeks to step in as a sort of “nanny” to the student population.

Furthermore, the ban smacks of a solution in search of a problem. Regulations on smoking already exist on campus and, so far as I can tell (admittedly, anecdotally) students have no significant issues with these existing regulations. But leave it to an overly zealous university bureaucracy to create, diagnose, and “solve” a problem that didn’t exist before they conjured it up. The medical campus has a smoking ban already, and yet you can walk or drive by that part of campus any day of the week and easily spot individuals violating it; which is to say that a smoking ban would also be, in the words of this paper’s editorial board, a “seemingly impossible injunction.”

Finally, the evidence suggesting a link between chronic or terminal illnesses and secondhand smoke is tenuous at best. In an article in “Skeptic Magazine” in 2007, writer Sidney Zion breaks down the science, coming to the conclusion that a recent surgeon general’s report on the alleged deleterious effects of secondhand smoke is “nothing but junk science,” a house of cards upon which all smoking bans are based.

With our university facing dire financial straits and students struggling to figure out how they will pay for their education, it would certainly be a breath of fresh air if our university president and board of trustees focused less on policing our personal health and more time helping us with the problems in our pocketbooks. But I’m not holding my breath.