We walk by them all the time on campus, the little huts with the green roofs and translucent windows that provide shelter for all the smokers here at the College.
It was announced last week that the ‘butt huts’, as many students call them, will soon be removed, as smoking will be banned on campus.
Starting next week, the shacks will be disassembled by campus personnel; in fact two of the most popular areas; the butt huts behind the cafeteria and the pottery studio, have already had parts removed.
No one can explain why this happened so suddenly, but there are plenty of rumors.
Some say the Dean of Controlled Substances is a smoker and kept the butt huts around to grab a smoke in between board meetings. Others say the campus Justice-y League finally persuaded the DEA to crack down on all the people who smoke marijuana instead of cigarettes. As far as conspiracy theories are concerned, the latter seems most likely.
“We need Nick Naylor, the tobacco lobbyist from ‘Thank You for Smoking’, he could set this whole things right.” said Kevin Dullard, a student smoker.
“Something should be done to reverse the ban before the smoking community at BCC goes into shock and withdrawal, and we have a bunch of short tempered shaky students roaming the halls looking for a battle of the wits because they didn’t get their fix this morning,” said Dullard.
The students and some of the faculty will surely be outraged once the smoke huts are gone.
“They provide a sense of community that transcends the classroom, little rendezvous’ where people catch up on each other’s lives while poisoning themselves…is there anything so horribly wrong with that?” said one instructor, who wished not to be named.
Some think that this call for the removal of the huts and the banning of smoking was not a move by popular demand.
It is thought by these to be a decision that came from the upper echelon of the college.
“Whoever’s job it is to worry about the image of BCC shouldn’t be bothered by its own little subcommunities of smokers.” said Dullard.
Aldrich Ibsen, a fellow aspiring journalist and communications student at BCC asks, “Would you go into someone else’s home and take away their dinner table? The one place their family meets, even if only for an hour a night over mediocre food, to catch up and get filled in…no you wouldn’t, because it is the one thing that keeps them together, the qualifier that makes some of us students a ‘family’ is the butt huts”.
Campus will be changing in the next weeks to come as the demolition begins, but one things is for sure BCC will be a smoke free campus