The campus chapter of the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group will likely appeal last week’s decision to discontinue its contract with student government next year. Regardless of the outcome of such an appeal, it is safe to assume that OSPIRG’s future will be a topic of conversation on campus for some time, OSPIRG members said Wednesday.
Appealing the decision of the Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee will be the first step. If the committee refuses to reconsider the contract – which it unanimously voted no to fund last Thursday – OSPIRG members can ask the ASUO Senate to reinstate funds when the committee’s final budget comes up for a vote. It would take the support of two-thirds of the Senate to restore the contract.
“If worse came to worse and we still got defunded at the end of the appeals process,” OSPIRG board member Sarah Harbert said, “I think there would still be people here who would want to be in OSPIRG next year and would try to bring the chapter back.”
With ASUO elections less than two months away, OSPIRG supporters see an opportunity to mobilize students in favor of their work and possibly influence next year’s ASUO Executive and other student representatives to reinstate the contract or reconstitute OSPIRG as a student program.
“It’s not just about OSPIRG,” Harbert said. “I think the issue here is student voice. That’s why so many other groups have come out in support of us.”
ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz carefully signaled Wednesday that he could be willing to see a reconstituted campus chapter. “I think there are more appropriate models by which OSPIRG could be fitted onto the incidental fee,” he said, before adding that any negotiation to do so would result in “nothing resembling in any way what it is structured like now.”
The primary criticism of OSPIRG has been its use of student fees to pay off-campus professionals, which OSPIRG’s proponents contend is the entire purpose of the organization. At the very least, campus organizer Mike Reagan said, the statewide student organization needs to have a paid advocate working on its behalf in the Legislature, an organizer for each chapter and an executive director to oversee them.
However, without ASUO funds for even a single year, the statewide organization will be in a dire financial situation. OSPIRG has already lost funding from two other institutions, Portland State University and Central Oregon Community College, totalling more than $158,000 removed from a proposed budget of roughly $420,000 for next year. If the ASUO fully funded OSPIRG’s request for $120,000, University students would be paying nearly half of the statewide student organization’s budget.
Without funding from the ASUO, the student PIRG would be left with funding from Lane Community College, Southern Oregon University and Oregon State University, totalling between $136,000 and $143,000 next year, or a little more than a quarter of its planned operating budget for 2009-10 that included the support of all six schools that once contributed.
“That would obviously be a setback,” OSPIRG Executive Director Dave Rosenfeld said in a telephone interview. “To have a student-directed program that has an impact on public policy, it costs money. And if you don’t have money, you don’t have that program.”
The statewide student PIRG pays for half of Rosenfeld’s salary. The other half is paid for by the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization with the same acronym as the student organization.
It is unclear how far the argument of limiting student power will take OSPIRG amid a financial crisis in the state and deep cuts in higher education. ASUO Sen. Emma Kallaway said Wednesday that the Senate will face a choice bigger than funding OSPIRG in deciding how to prudently manage student resources without raising student fees.
“I think you can always fear student voice being lost, but I don’t see it as pattern of evil and how we’re going to see it coming up all over the place,” she said.
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