University of Wisconsin-Stout students voted April 15 to make their campus the first smoke- and tobacco-free four-year university in the state.

A referendum in the UW-Stout Student Association elections let students decide if they wanted to make their campus tobacco-free in addition to smoke-free. Fifty-five percent of the ballots were in favor of the ban.

UW-Stout spokesperson Doug Mell said the ban would be implemented Sept. 1.

While some two-year campuses and technical colleges are smoke and tobacco-free, it is harder for a four-year campus to be because students who smoke and use other tobacco products live on campus, Mell said.

Last year students voted to make campus smoke-free by a large margin, UW-Stout Student Association President Phil Rizzo said.

UW-Stout may have been the first campus to be both smoke and tobacco-free, but UW-Madison has had policies for a smoke-free campus in place longer.

UW has had strict smoke-free policies in place since 1991 and revised them in 2008, but it does not have tobacco-free policies, according to a 2008 statement from the UW Office of the Chancellor.

“Once we become tobacco-free, there will be some other ones in the system who will follow suit. Frankly, I expect Madison to be tobacco-free in the next few years,” Mell said.

Mell said this is not just a trend in the UW System, but for society as well.

Universities in prominent tobacco-growing areas of the country are going tobacco-free. If they are, Mell said, UW-Stout could too.

Rizzo said he expected the results to be closer, and there were some complaints from students.

Rizzo said an anonymous comment on one of the ballots read, “I can understand smoking because second hand smoking does kill, but chewing tobacco hurts no one but themselves.”

He said it was important for students to vote on the issue so it did not seem as though the university was pushing the ban on them.

Mell said student response to the ban has been pretty quiet. An e-mail was sent out to 10,000 UW Stout students, and there were only 12 responses.

“I haven’t seen a Facebook page,” Mell said, in reference to the page students created in response to UW-Stout Chancellor Charles Sorensen’s crackdown on drinking earlier this month.