There is no question as to the good intentions of the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group members and volunteers on campus. They believe in the student voice: the good fight, the opportunity to lobby for what we believe in. They want us all to know that the student PIRG is one way for them to make our voice a presence on Capitol Hill.
And perhaps this is could be true — but their means of canvassing and ruthless persistence distract us from the inherent good nature of OSPIRG. Their unfavorable campus reputation comes not from their intentions but from their actions.
OSPIRG’s supporters are on the street corner.
They are going door to door at Ducks Village in the middle of the night.
They are waiting for us outside of Lillis Business Complex.
And oddly enough, they have even resorted to interrupting the Mills International Center Coffee Hour, looking for signatures on their petition.
“There were like three of them (OSPIRG petitioners), and they kind of spread out across the room, and they were all signing; it just seemed really rude to me. We’re there to have coffee and have fun with each other,” University sophomore Daniel Hartley said.
While the lobbyists’ persistence has been more or less an unfavorable nuisance to many, marketing their values to students who were in their own meeting is unreasonable.
At some point they have to know when to leave people alone. They are well within their rights to pursue us as we roam the campus, but a new level of irritation is reached when a lobbying organization (lobbying for the ability to fund the state public interest research groups — the PIRG in OSPIRG — lobbying) starts coming to our homes and our own campus meetings.
Bluntly put, it makes students not like OSPIRG.
OSPIRG seems to have grown desperate. Much like a door-to-door salesman, it is pitching us its product by any means necessary. While its primary goal is the promotion of student voice, its primary function for the past few years has been to secure signatures and funds.
And where do those funds, that $117,000 go? To fund lobbyists.
The members even resorted to bombarding ASUO Sen. Brianna Woodside-Gomez, the chairperson of the Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee, with e-mails and text messages after she announced earlier this week that there would be no opportunity for public comment at the meeting.
If OSPIRG has to be this relentless to get 3,000 signatures, then how popular and favorable to the student body can it be?
Moreover, if the ASUO represents the student body, and OSPIRG is unfavorable to the student body, then how could the ASUO vote in favor of them?
Luckily, the ACFC was thinking the same thing with a four-to-one vote against voting upon its budget proposal. The ASUO made the right choice. OSPIRG is not popular with students; most of us would not be interested in funding politicians in Portland with our incidental fee, and the past few years have proven that the campus has grown disillusioned with its whole organization.
The students themselves spend most of their time collecting signatures and funds for the state PIRGs, who then invite the OSPIRG panel to Washington, D.C., where they barely play a role in the happenings of the lobbyists.
It pays politicians to represent the student voice through lobbying, but a key component is missed: How does it know what the student voice is if it doesn’t do any campus-wide polls or hold meetings with us to understand what issues actually concern the University’s student population? And if the students never get to speak to the representatives they pay $117,000 to represent them, how can they ever realistically believe those representatives will speak for them?
If OSPIRG spent more time going around trying to understand what the campus wants and less time trying to collect our signatures, then we just might have supported its cause. But its assertion of “student concerns” without a strong establishment of what student concerns actually are (other than the fact that we are a predominately liberal campus) discredits its very essence.
Credit the ACFC for doing what it is supposed to do — represent the wants and well-being of us, the University of Oregon students.
Perhaps OSPIRG could learn something from them about that.
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