The ASUO senate voted against putting the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group on the ASUO elections ballot at its Feb. 24 meeting, citing concerns about a lack of racial equity in OSPIRG’s advocacy work. Following the decision, OSPIRG decided against pursuing other avenues of getting on the ballot postpone its biennial reaffirmation until 2022.
After the senate’s unanimous decision, OSPIRG chair Elizabeth Radcliffe said it didn’t make sense to try to collect signatures from the required 10% of the UO student body given the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We can’t table,” she said. “We can’t do class announcements. We don’t have access to our peers the way that we normally would, and it just isn’t possible to reach the thousands of students that we need to run a real reaffirmation vote.”
OSPIRG Organizing Director Lucas Gutterman said the referendum vote at UO is an opportunity for students to show support for OSPIRG’s campaigns and reaffirm that they’re willing to pay a couple of dollars every term for that work. The vote also gives OSPIRG’s voice more power and weight when it meets with elected officials, Gutterman said.
Currently, OSPIRG — an Oregon student-run nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy group — is running campaigns on hunger and homelessness, clean electricity and textbook affordability.
The lack of a student vote doesn’t mean OSPIRG won’t be present on UO’s campus next year; ASUO’s Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee approved the organization’s funding for the 2021-22 academic year at a January contract hearing. However, it does mean ACFC will have more power over its OSPIRG contract going into negotiations for the 2022-23 fiscal year.
OSPIRG took root on UO’s campus after politician and former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader spoke on campus in 1970. “He had this idea of setting up public interest research groups throughout the country and basing it on campuses,” 1970-71 ASUO President Ron Eachus said.
Eachus said students at UO were excited about Nader’s idea and started working to get something in place almost immediately. When UO’s OSPIRG chapter was established, students paid $1 per term for public advocacy and research. According to a 2008 Daily Emerald article, OSPIRG had chapters at 12 Oregon colleges in the 1970s, and statewide PIRGs popped up across the country.
Over time, this enthusiasm waned. Today, only UO, Lane Community College and Southern Oregon University fund OSPIRG chapters through student fees — though OSPIRG also has chapters at Portland State and Oregon State University.
“We have a pretty good relationship with OSPIRG,” Associated Students of SOU President Andrew Zucker said. He said OSPIRG’s SOU chapter has helped students build advocacy skills, as well as aiding SOU in lobbying for things like a basic needs navigator at a statewide level. “Without their sort of research, us students wouldn’t really have a lot of the resources that we need to lobby in an effective or competent way,” Zucker said.
However, at LCC and UO, that relationship is more complicated.
ASUO cut OSPIRG funding in 1998 following opposition from a conservative student group on campus and removed funding again in 2009, this time citing concerns about OSPIRG using student incidental fee money to pay professional staff members who do not operate exclusively on UO’s campus.
OSPIRG returned as a fully funded program through ACFC in the years that followed — and through a student referendum vote in ASUO elections.
Shana Weiland, LCC’s student government vice president, said LCC has taken its own measures to reduce OSPIRG funding. LCC students currently pay $3 per term to fund OSPIRG organizing, but that number will drop to $2.50 for the 2021-22 school year— barring any change that emerges from the appeals process. UO students each pay $1.75 for OSPIRG.
According to OSPIRG’s UO chapter website, it pools this student fee money from across the state to hire full-time professional staff to help student advocacy efforts. Gutterman said an entry-level position pays $35,000 a year — something he said he sees as a fair rate for a student-funded nonprofit job. “The reality is that the folks that are working for us care about making a difference,” he said. “They don’t want to get paid a fat check. That would not really be appropriate.”
ASUO Senator Nick Keough said they’re worried about the lack of transparency around how OSPIRG uses its student fees and the fact that students may not know what their $1.75 is going toward. In fact, students are allowed to ask any lobbying OSPIRG representative for their money back and OSPIRG has to cut a check for $1.75.
Weiland said LCC’s student government brought up the lack of transparency during budget hearings last year, and OSPIRG came back with more information this time around. Still, he said the numbers he got were written as a fraction of a percentile of a full-time employee position. “It became very hard to actually calculate that out in the room,” he said, “to figure out what we’re actually contributing and what we’re getting for that contribution to those members who are not full time on the Lane campus.”
Kyra Solis and Katie Stafford, former OSPIRG board members at UO, said they both credit OSPIRG with helping them develop community organizing and advocacy skills in their time with the organization. Still, both highlighted issues they saw in the way the organization was run toward the end of their time with the group.
Although Stafford said her initial experience with OSPIRG was positive, that changed when it brought in a new campus organizer. “There was a shift in the culture and how things were going that a lot of us weren’t thrilled with,” she said. That organizer has since left OSPIRG.
At the time, Stafford was a college student, volunteering at a lab and serving as vice president for the OSPIRG board — on top of dealing with her own health issues. She said new OSPIRG leadership told her she was expected to spend 20 hours a week campaigning — on top of whatever time she spent in meetings — because it was what she signed up for. This was the first time Stafford was made aware of these expectations, she said.
“I personally felt that that wasn’t responsible,” Stafford said. “It was irresponsible of me to be putting all of my time on something that wasn’t going to directly affect my education or my health.” She said she found this expectation frustrating, especially for an unpaid position.
“It’s definitely part of the nonprofit world to rely on volunteer labor,” Solis, who still works for a nonprofit, said. “But to do so with the free labor of students to such an extent that they start struggling like that — it’s totally unethical.”
Gutterman said he does not remember talking with board members about the amount of time OSPIRG professional staff asked them to put into their work.
Radcliffe said she currently spends between 10 and 15 hours a week on OSPIRG, a commitment greater than most UO student volunteers, since she chairs both the UO chapter and the OSPIRG board.
Solis spent a large portion of fall 2017 coordinating OSPIRG’s campaign in opposition to the LNG Jordan Cove pipeline. She said the staff pushback she experienced when trying to get the campaign off the ground felt antithetical to OSPIRG’s mission as a student-run organization.
The students coordinating most of OSPIRG’s campaigns work with a professional organizer to write class announcements.
However, Gutterman wrote the announcement for the LNG pipeline. Gutterman said it’s part of his position to write materials for OSPIRG’s lead campaigns, including the LNG pipeline in 2017, and that any controversy was due to miscommunication.
“I think the reality of that situation was that there was a lot of poor communication in the relationship between new staff people and the existing student leadership,” he said.
Solis also took issue with the fact that the announcement did not include acknowledgement of the fact that the pipeline would run over Indigenous lands — something she said she specifically asked Gutterman to incorporate. “By removing them entirely, you’re erasing them,” she said.
“You cannot separate environmentalism from the needs of People of Color and queer people,” Solis said.
Gutterman said he doesn’t remember seeing Indigenous land mentioned in the project proposal.
For Stafford and Solis, their experiences with OSPIRG — and the experiences of other board members they witnessed — led to the board resigning en masse at the end of 2017.
Solis said the board that year was the most diverse that she remembers, with at least three out of six identifying as queer, BIPOC or Latinx.
Keough worked with OSPIRG from fall 2017 through winter 2020, especially focusing on its textbook affordability campaigns. Over time, they noticed the lack of a racial justice lens in OSPIRG’s advocacy — specifically in its environmental work — and decided to step away from the group.
They said they voiced these concerns via Instagram early last summer and were met by responses from roughly 15 UO and LCC students sharing personal stories about working with OSPIRG. Among these students was a member of the 2017 board, who brought the mass resignation to light.
Keough passed the information they gathered — including screenshots of various student responses and the 2017 board’s resignation letter — on to ACFC at the end of June 2020.
ACFC member Jon Laus said the committee decided to ask all of its service providers to include a racial equity clause in its contract with ACFC ahead of this year’s negotiations. “We’re in the midst of this huge movement,” he said, alluding to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country last summer. “Why don’t we capitalize on it?”
Laus said OSPIRG pushed back against adding a racial equity campaign when ACFC presented it with the idea during Summer 2020. ACFC meeting minutes from last summer show OSPIRG described itself as a “public advocacy group” rather than a “social justice organization” — though OSPIRG’s website now highlights that it sees racial justice as an issue of public interest.
Radcliffe said OSPIRG is now working to add a racial justice lens to its various campaigns in light of protests last summer, though it is still discussing what concrete plans will look like. Still, she said it is working to include information about how BIPOC communities are often most affected by the issues OSPIRG is advocating for and to collaborate with the UO Multicultural Center in centering BIPOC voices going forward.
“We agree that integrating racial justice more into our campaigns is a really important and urgent issue,” Stone told the ASUO senate. Stone said OSPIRG also donated money raised for its hunger and homelessness campaign to Huerto de la Familia — a garden that focuses on helping Latinx Eugenians — instead of Food for Lane County.
Keough asked Gutterman at the senate’s Feb. 24 meeting what OSPIRG did to ensure it was supporting BIPOC and queer students following the 2017 resignations. Gutterman said he and OSPIRG director Charlie Fisher worked to improve communication between professional staff and students.
Laus said ACFC is taking a more active approach in ensuring OSPIRG integrates a racial equity lens into its work going forward. Although the language of the 2021-22 contract is still being finalized, he said they’re adding a clause that asks OSPIRG to meet with ACFC biannually to go over OSPIRG’s plans and allow ACFC to provide feedback.
Laus said adding this language will help ACFC ensure that OSPIRG follows through on its commitment to racial justice in its campaigns going forward.
