Junior psychology and communication major Eden Vierthaler brought her third Parliament Light of the day to her lips and inhaled.

The cigarette glowed. Smoke wafted slowly past her fingers and face and dissolved in the midday sun.

“At least it’s not freezing out here today,” Vierthaler said, sitting on a bench outside Elliott Hall.

Her Parliament Light burned in her hand.

In the coming school year, Vierthaler and other smokers may not have this moment on campus.

At a Faculty Senate meeting Monday afternoon, Student Government Association President Matt Conklin and members from the organization “Tobacco Free Wu & Me” presented their resolution and research to-date in support of a tobacco-free campus.

The students’ brief presentation was one of many the group has given since their work began last semester.

“Tobacco Free Wu & Me” is led by President Emma Crabtree, a senior psychology major, and SGA Vice President Jasmine Douglas, a graduate student in community psychology.

The group’s purpose is to reach out to students, student organizations, faculty and staff and gauge the support of a tobacco-free campus.

“One of the important things is that we are maintaining a healthy and respectful community on campus,” Crabtree said.

To collect the range of opinions, the group conducted six focus groups with smokers, a campus-wide survey questioning tobacco use and support for a tobacco free campus, and held events on campus.

The amount of work and research is an effort, as Conklin said at the meeting, “…to not appear as us forcing ourselves upon any certain group or contingency on campus.”

This bottom-up approach means going from organization to organization, presenting the research and hearing the feedback.

“The research efforts and all of our outreach have gone to show, and only strengthen the argument, that we should implement a tobacco-free policy,” Conklin said.

Moving forward, neither of the three had an exact date on when a policy change at WSU could occur. There is more research and outreach to be done.

It could be late fall, this time next year or the summer and fall 2016.

If the policy was to change on campus, it would have to be approved by University President John Bardo, and it would likely mirror other tobacco-free policies and ban all tobacco and nicotine use on WSU’s campus.

The Tobacco Free Wu & Me research survey found from a random sample of 557 people at WSU, nearly 65 percent of those support a tobacco-free campus.

Vierthaler isn’t one of them. She took a final drag of her cigarette and stubbed it against the bench.

“As long as you are 20 feet from the buildings, or whatever the rule is, I don’t know why it (smoking) would necessarily be a problem,” Vierthaler said.

She paused, and waved away the last bit of smoke in front of her.

 “I don’t know … I see that it could be obnoxious to some people, but I don’t think there should be a law prohibiting what you can do on the outside of campus.”