In the wake of the campus-wide smoking ban which took effect January 1, 2014, nearly 85% of UCSB’s English majors have transferred or dropped out of the school as of January 17th.

The ban has been called “a resounding success” by university officials who revealed to reporters last Thursday that its true purpose was not to promote better student health, but to expel hundreds of English and Comparative Literature majors from campus. UC President Janet Napolitano, an expert in removing unwanted persons from a given area, believes the exodus of bibliophilic academics to be a vast improvement to the UCSB community.

“By banning smoking at UCSB, we solved what might be the biggest problem facing the UC campuses today,” said Napolitano. “Finally, students will no longer have to suffer the pretentious ramblings of these pestilent English majors with their dog-eared copies of ‘Infinite Jest’ and disgusting Parliament cigarettes.”

The new campus policy has been relatively simple to enforce according to numerous campus security and UCPD officers. “We were told to keep an eye out for anybody wearing a pea coat or having a conversation about the fractured personal narratives of women in contemporary Irish poetry,” said Sergeant Frank Glover of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol, “but as far as we can tell, those most likely to fit that description have skipped town already. This smoking ban has really hit them where it hurts.”

Indeed, the remaining UCSB English majors, such as third-year Esperanza Perez, have expressed their outrage towards what they perceive to be a biased policy. “I can’t believe that the administration would just blatantly try to get rid of us like this,” said Perez while sipping a white chocolate mocha in a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on State Street. “They know that I can’t comprehend the symbolism in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ without taking a drag after every paragraph, so they’re clearly out to get me and my peers.”

“Sorry,” added Perez, “I meant my peers and me.”

Unfortunately for Perez and her fellow literati, the majority of the school seems to support the smoking ban, regardless of the personal freedoms it may curb. “I don’t care what these obnoxious, highfalutin tar-lungs say about their ‘right to smoke,’” said fourth-year Economics major Dan Merle as he tossed empty cans of Keystone Light at nearby homeless children collecting them for recycling. “Their filthy habit is making this school look bad, and I for one am tired of not being taken seriously.”

“Besides, what kind of loser wants to be an English major?” added Merle. “Reading, like smoking, is fucking gay.”

Due to the overwhelming success of the initiative, the administration is considering a campus-wide ban on red lipstick to solve what they call “the Feminist Studies pest problem.”