Go Tar Heels (off campus to smoke, please)

My alma mater has gone too far. Normally I love everything Carolina Blue. I love the crisp autumn nights in Polk Place and Kenan Stadium. I love watching a Carolina victory in the Dean Dome. Heck, I even loved going to class, at least the times I went, when I was there.
I especially loved buying a pack of cigarettes at the Campus Y and smoking between classes when I knew my girlfriend at the time would not catch me, and taking a smoke break on long nights at the Daily Tar Heel.
I read last night in Carolina Alumni Review about the school's new smoking ban, and I have to say I am offended, not only as a smoker but as a North Carolinian and former student.
If you haven't heard, the school essentially banned smoking on campus by saying there is no smoking within 100 feet of a public building. Every building on campus is a "public building," meaning there is just a small strip down Polk and McCorkle that where you can light up.
Here are three reasons why this is a bad policy:
1. Universities are supposed to be the last bastian of free thought. Why not let students make their own minds up about smoking. Sure, smoking is bad for you. It causes Cancer. It stinks and litters up the campus. But kids are always going to be kids unless you allow them to make their own minds up about what is good and bad.
2. That campus was built on tobacco (well, at least the parts that weren't built by slave labor.) This is the tobacco state, and since the 1970s, it has been turning its back on the very farmers and industrialists who paid for most of the state buildings here.
3. There are always going to be exams and drinking on campus. Therefore, there is always going to be smoking. Does the school need to invest its money into enforcing a ban that essentially meant to keep people from killing themselves? Why not save that money to build another building and name it for some rich person that no one knows?