Throughout efforts to eliminate student funding for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group, the group’s members continue to say its service to campus through advocacy makes it worth funding with student fees, despite the ASUO’s budgetary constraints.
The University’s OSPIRG chapter is not currently funded by the University’s incidental fee. Former ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz began questioning student funding for the group at the start of his 2008-09 term. As a result, the Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee decided in February 2009 to not fund the group for the 2009-10 year.
Even though OSPIRG has continually held hearings with the ASUO in the two years since losing University funding — the ACFC repeated its decision in February 2010 — since the 2009 decision, the chapter has been funded the last two years by an infusion of $80,000 from the Oregon State PIRG. It is undecided whether the state PIRG will continue funding the University chapter after this year.
OSPIRG Board Chair Charles Denson spoke to a number of the campaign accomplishments the group has made to justify OSPIRG’s funding on campus, emphasizing campaigns for health insurance reform and textbook affordability efforts.
“We actually reformed the state’s health care system … to cut a lot of wasteful spending through administrative costs,” Denson said. “It’s projected to save the state $10 billion over the next 10 years; that actually comes from a lot of the work we did on campuses across the state and the work of our health-care advocate, Laura Etherton.”
Denson also mentioned a recently formed rule making health insurance companies in Oregon file with the state to justify rate increases when they want to make them.
“The state can actually go over that and say what is justifiable and what is not,” Denson said.
Chip Shields, state senator for District 22, which represents Portland, wrote in February 2010 that Etherton and OSPIRG have been on the “forefront of fighting the battle” to reform the health care system. Denson cited this as evidence to support the students’ work correlating to health care results.
On the health care issue, Denson said, students ran campaigns for educating the public where they had students sign petitions, send stories to their elected officials and hold press conferences on work they were doing.
Denson also mentioned textbook affordability, and while he said there is considerable work to make the cornerstone — open-source textbooks — more of a reality, there has already been some work done. Through a national campaign, the PIRGs’ work sparked a congressional investigation into textbook prices that resulted in a law that requires textbook companies to disclose prices to professors.
Oregon Rep. David Wu wrote to state PIRG Executive Director Dave Rosenfeld about the detailed work in the legislature as a result of student involvement.
“In short, I am proud of what Oregon students, through OSPIRG, have done to impact this issue,” Wu wrote. “Oregon should continue to lead the way.”
ASUO Vice President Maneesh Arora worked with OSPIRG as the textbook campaign manager last winter term. He worked to get University professors to sign statements of intent and students to fill out surveys about open-source textbooks, getting many positive responses. Arora said the campaign work alone is not enough, however.
“The statements of intent we get and surveys we get are great, but those by themselves aren’t going to make that legislation pass. What we actually need are advocates to talk to our legislators and help draft the legislation,” Arora said, adding that students and advocates must “work together in order to actually create change.”
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