Universities change attitudes

Technology is replacing Big Tobacco in North Carolina's economy.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) -- Universities built or buttressed by cigarette fortunes once stood as majestic symbols of the power of Big Tobacco. Today, those same campuses have come to reflect a society turning away from the golden leaf.
At Duke University, Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina, efforts to restrict smoking and the on-campus sale of cigarettes have given rise to much ironic commentary, but barely a whiff of protest.
"As long as they're not going to say no smoking on campus, it doesn't bother me," UNC art student Jessica Largent said after snuffing out a cigarette in the shadow of a campus building that bears the name of the daughter of a former R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. vice president.
The changing attitudes come at a time when an industry that was once one of North Carolina's economic mainstays has been pushed aside by a state increasingly focused on high technology.
With the decline in smoking and the rise of overseas growers, the number of tobacco farmers in North Carolina has fallen 39 percent in the past decade, and the amount grown has been cut in half.
"Its importance has declined relative to the new economy," says UNC history professor Jim Leloudis. "The balance in some ways has tipped ... it's no longer so central that it is untouchable."
Restrictions
And though schools here and in Virginia and South Carolina still gratefully accept tobacco-related donations, they have not hesitated to impose smoking restrictions that put them in line with other schools nationally.
At Duke, where a statue of tobacco magnate and benefactor James B. Duke shows him proudly puffing on a cigar, smoking is banned in all buildings and only one campus outlet even sells tobacco.
Wake Forest may owe its very existence to tobacco. In 1956, heirs to the R.J. Reynolds fortune used the promise of a new, 14-building campus to persuade officials of the foundering Baptist school to make the 100-mile move from north of Raleigh to Winston-Salem. Over the years, the college has received nearly $130 million from Reynolds heirs or the company.
But that didn't stop Wake Forest from barring smoking in many campus buildings and limiting it in residence halls.
It also dropped the name of Bowman Gray, a former RJR president, from its medical school in 1997. School leaders insist the change had nothing to do with Gray's line of work, but some doctors had undoubtedly chafed at working under the name of a tobacco tycoon.
Deep roots
At North Carolina, school-run stores have been told no more cigarettes will be sold once stocks sell out, and smoking will be banned in dormitories beginning this summer.
Tobacco has deep roots at UNC. It has educated at least three R.J. Reynolds presidents, and Reynolds heirs or company leaders have established trusts -- one worth nearly $11 million -- that have endowed scholarships, supplemented professor pay and financed other initiatives.
Duke continues to collect annual donations from an endowment built when tobacco was king. Now worth more than $2 billion, the endowment created by James B. Duke in the 1920s supports religion, education and health care in the Carolinas. One of its first major donations, in 1924, led to struggling Trinity College's being refounded as Duke University.
In 2003, Duke received almost $30 million from the endowment, which now has almost no tobacco-related holdings. School spokesman Keith Lawrence said the university does not allow its tobacco roots to affect present-day policies.
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