The Student Senate is arguably the most powerful student organization on campus. These elected officials invest their time and energy to make our campus a better and more enjoyable place, both in their elected positions and out of their own personal initiative. Such is the case with Jeffrey Schwan and Jordan O’Connell and their promotion of the the smoking ban referendum.

I commend Schwan and O’Connell for their active role in promoting the poll with posters supporting the proposal plastered across the entire campus. This shows a great amount of initiative, the kind of initiative that I am thrilled to see in the campus’ elected officials. The committment presented by these two shows a true dedication to the service of their constituents.

That being said, I feel that they took a misstep in using this opportunity to promote voting for the proposal, as opposed to taking the chance to help raise the campus’ comprehension of the ins and outs of the proposal itself. Now to make this perfectly clear, the two senators printed these posters with their own money, and it was not a Student Senate initiative, so no foul play was involved. While certainly their first ammendment rights give them the right to print whatever they want, especially in a personal initiative, I can’t help but feel that the campus would have benefited as a whole if instead of seeing a picture of Dean of Students Rich Egley lighting one up, the student body could have seen some of the specifics on what exactly the proposal entailed, aside from the minute amount of information provided in the poll question.

To be entirely fair, the responsibility does not lie predominately on the sentators to make the entire campus aware of the proposed changes to the campus smoking policy. That responsibility would seem to lie more with the senate as a whole, which I feel did not do as an effective of a job as they could have making the student body aware of what the proposal entailed. The most I saw about the changes posted on campus was a page tacked up near the Pioneer Involvement Center that only gave information about the referendum and listed the poll question, which informed the passer-by simply that there was a proposed ban on non-academic areas of campus and violation would result in a monetary fee. There is no mention of the fact that the fine is fairly steep, sitting at 50 dollars, nor is there any mention of what constitutes academic and non-academic areas.

I still commend Sen. Schwan and O’Connell for taking the extra initiative to improve our campus, as well as the Student Senate as a whole. Despite that there was not been enough work to raise awareness of the proposal itself, the posters put up by the senators at least helped raise awareness of the referendum, leading the poll to have one of the highest voter turnouts in a senate referendum, and giving the campus body the chance to help make campus what they want it to be.