Loyola instituted a campus-wide smoking ban on Aug. 1, but yet there are still people who smoke as they walk to class or have a cigarette break next to the library.

It bothers me to see such a blatant disregard for the rules.

Especially since pretty much every university in the state has gone smoke-free in the past year, it is easy to see that Loyola did not just make this rule just to have it. Loyola made this rule to follow the examples set by other schools in promoting a healthier lifestyle.

According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, there are 1,620 campuses around the country that are 100 percent smoke free as of 2015.

Our campus is tiny compared to a lot of other schools, so it should not be hard to take a short walk to the edge of campus. Let’s be real, our campus is probably too small to be able to smoke an entire cigarette as you walk from one class to another.

There’s really no reason to break this rule. Nothing about making students take a few more steps before they light up is too horrible. It does not make sense to knowingly break rules when complying is as simple as this is. If this rule was life-altering or unfair in any way, I would understand the reluctance to comply, but it’s not.

If people keep breaking this rule, I can imagine that will only prompt Loyola to enforce the ban more strictly, which could result in actual consequences for the smokers who do not take the ban seriously.

It seems to me that it would be easier to just follow the rules in the first place rather than have to worry about getting caught just because you feel like smoking on the Danna Center porch.

I went to a private high school with a very strict dress code that dictated everything from the length of the guys’ hair to the kind of socks I put on every morning. People were sent home for wearing skirts too short or not having the appropriate hair cuts.

This dress code convinced me the high-low skirt trend started because Catholic school girls wanted short skirts that could still measure in at two inches from the back of the knee. The idea of putting in the effort to measure and re-hem your skirt just to try to make a plaid uniform skirt cuter seemed ridiculous to me. We were in high school to learn, not to look cute.

As sneaky as the girls that were re-hemming skirts and rolling their waistbands up thought they were, the administrators noticed. Skirt checks became more random and frequent, and a lot of the girls were sent home or got in trouble for something they could have easily avoided doing.

While no one is going to be sent home from Loyola for smoking on campus, the same idea still applies. Smoking here is something that is easily avoided. There’s no reason why someone can’t wait to get off of campus to smoke. Since these people are knowingly breaking the rule, they now cannot get upset when they finally get in trouble for doing so.

We all came to Loyola to further our educations, not because it was one of the last schools in the state to ban smoking. Students’ ability to study and go to class is not affected in the least by whether or not they can smoke on campus.