It’s fairly common knowledge that smoking is bad for your health.

But if you’re a professor, a Michigan senator’s recent proposal could make it bad for your career.

Sen. Thomas George, R-Kalamazoo, suggested universities avoid hiring professors who smoke because it drives up health care costs.

This proposal, driven purely by logistics, overlooks, and in fact runs contrary, to the entire point of a faculty hiring.

Universities, so we are told, generally frame their searches around experience in the professor’s field, be it research or teaching. Qualifications stem from quality and quantity.

These have nothing to do with whether a faculty member smokes.

George likely would not dispute this. The question is not whether one’s smoking hinders one’s teaching or research, but rather whether one’s smoking is an encumbrance on the university’s budget.

In a sense, the question is whether a professor’s perceived health risks outweigh his or her skill as a professor.

In dire economic times, fiscal necessity could bring to the forefront a “health-risk” analysis – there isn’t much money to spare.

But at no point should a desire to cut costs serve to deny a brilliant individual, perfectly suited for professorship, a faculty position.

To limit faculty searches to non-smokers is to far overextend an individual’s habits – and the expenses that may ensue – into his or her professional life.

The purely logistic approach, unfortunately, makes relevant certain criteria that ought not to be relevant: The skill of a professor should be the decisive factor.

As universities continue to reevaluate their budgets, they would do best to avoid George’s absurd suggestion and to seek savings elsewhere.

Universities certainly should promote healthy habits – and these extend far beyond whether somebody smokes – but this is not as dire or unreasonable as framing a hiring around smoking habits.

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