Anti-smoking groups are trying to light a match under the University of Toronto's St. Michael's College with a media campaign aimed at pressuring the school to hand back a $150,000 donation from a tobacco company.

"This company is trying to buy respectability without responsibility and St. Mike's is selling," said Dr. Atul Kapur, of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada.

Imperial Tobacco made the $150,000 donation almost two years ago at the school's request. The school earmarked the money for a new certificate program in corporate ethics, prompting at least o­ne program adviser and o­ne professor to offer their resignations.

"How a university can use unethical money from an unethical company to fund a program in ethics is beyond belief," Bob Willard, a former member of the course's advisory board, said at a news conference yesterday.

The anti-smoking groups unveiled a four-page insert published in yesterday's edition of a campus newspaper, as well as two radio ads that should begin airing next month, attacking the donation and the cigarette maker's marketing practices. The groups have been inspired in part by a similar controversy at a British university, where some instructors resigned over a cigarette maker's donation.

In addition to demanding the money be returned, the anti-smoking groups are calling o­n the university to set up an ethical screening committee, something the college's president, Richard Alway, says has already been done.

"Clearly in this area there are strongly held diverse opinions," Alway said in an interview about the groups' demands.

When asked if the committee might recommend giving the money back to Montreal-based Imperial Tobacco, Alway said, "In terms of what they are going to discuss, it is open-ended. They could decide whatever they want."

Although Imperial Tobacco knew its donation would be used for the course, the donation was sent to the school with no strings attached, said the tobacco maker's media manager Christina Dona.

The two-year course, which met two times a year for three days, was designed to educate business executives from across Canada o­n ways to improve their corporate and social responsibility.

Laurent Leduc, who founded the course and was o­ne of the instructors, said an assignment he designed, based o­n an actual donation made by a tobacco company to an English university, was rejected by St. Michael's College in November, 2001 after it received the donation.

With files from Canadian Press