The University’s chapter of the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group does not have a $120,000 student government contract this year to organize progressive political campaigns, but it is difficult to see what has changed.
For years OSPIRG volunteers stopped students on 13th Avenue soliciting pledges to join the group and signatures for countless causes. Beyond those activities, many thought the groups’ achievements were murky. Advocacy on legislation affecting everything from textbook prices to climate change, however noble, could not easily be traced back to OSPIRG’s actions and prove to be a prudent use of student dollars.
What began many years ago as a conservative crusade against the use of student fees for a liberal lobby turned into a critical mass of skepticism against an advocacy organization incapable of organizing enough support to save even itself, let alone the planet. OSPIRG, critics charged, took student money and sent it to professional lobbyists and all campus got in return was canvassers and requests for more cash.
This year OSPIRG is still soliciting members, mostly to build support to get another contract. There will be some other campaigns, but not much can be done when the statewide student PIRG is down to two member schools: Lane Community College and Southern Oregon University.
So the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group — the other OSPIRG, the non-student one which shares an acronym, office, paid advocates and a budget with the student PIRG — has loaned the student PIRG roughly $30,000 to continue organizing on this campus.
The student PIRG is still soliciting volunteers and has a paid full-time campus organizer. And he still has office space in the EMU’s Survival Center, which still houses all of OSPIRG’s “years worth of stuff,” the chair of the student PIRG’s statewide board, Charles Denson, said.
According to a 2008-2009 OSPIRG budget detail provided by Ben Ramsen-Stein, the new campus organizer, last year organizer salaries started at $23,700. This year, organizers at Lane and Southern are being paid about that much, according to the student PIRG’s budget.
Denson said the non-student PIRG put up the money because it is seen as an investment to have a student chapter funded on campus.
There’s good reason for that: The ASUO’s contract was 47 percent of the student PIRG’s budget last year. In the past few years OSPIRG has lost its chapters at Portland State University, Oregon State University, and Central Oregon University.
This University’s OSPIRG chapter was the first, in what was undoubtedly a student-led push to affect public policy on issues that made students rage back in 1971. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader came at the height of his influence to inaugurate the group, which was the second student PIRG behind Minnesota in what became a national movement for student empowerment and consumer and environmental protections.
“The pride thing,” of being the campus where OSPIRG started and where the movement began, is a meaningful argument to Diego Hernandez, the ASUO’s multicultural advocate and a student union stalwart. Hernandez said he supports OSPIRG and thinks the group can still rally a coalition of student backers.
OSPIRG backers have signaled they will continue to frame the debate as a question of student solidarity — whether the ASUO has the gumption to give students a voice against a cacophony of polluters, big oil men, crooked textbook publishers and the like. Perhaps this is true. OSPIRG has just done a terrible job of proving it.
ASUO President Emma Kallaway seems open to giving them another chance, so long as they give her the political cover to do so. “We’re actively listening,” she said of her administration’s position on OSPIRG.
In a campaign debate last spring, Kallaway was asked whether she would support OSPIRG coming back to campus, yes or no. Kallaway said yes, and later told the Emerald she would support them only as a student program, which are subjected to greater financial scrutiny, and only with a smaller budget.
On Tuesday she said it was “too soon to tell” whether it would be best for OSPIRG to be a program or a contracted service as it was before. She added that OSPIRG “should be aware of the ASUO’s budgetary challenges and make their case accordingly.”
Last year OSPIRG might have survived if its leadership had accepted a significant decrease in its contract, but instead opted to repeatedly tell the committee negotiating its contract it servicess were an all or nothing deal. The whole point of OSPIRG, it was said at the time, was to pay a campus organizer and contribute to the salaries of advocates who lobbied in Salem.
Now it seems a little more clear why they took the gamble: They were willing to lose the contract for a year and return when a friendlier president and finance committee would reinstate their contract.
Not much else has changed. Denson, the board chair, said the group would make sure it’s budget is efficient, but would mostly rely on telling its story and mobilizing support.
Perhaps Kallaway is making a shrewd gamble of her own. Student solidarity was the force behind and is the cause of her presidency. She can’t risk that to rescue a perennial punching bag for conservatives without OSPIRG proving it has wide student support. Why not give them the chance? They haven’t been able to prove it before.
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The OSPIRG you might see
Daily Emerald
September 29, 2009
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