The OSPIRG you can't see

Media Credit: Dave Martinez The Oregon Student Public Interest Group had its first meeting of the term Thursday night. OSPIRG focuses on issues affecting students; This year, the group's focus will include slowing global warming, protecting Oregon's wilderness, and decreasing poverty in Oregon. [Click to enlarge]

In OSPIRG's 37-year existence, it has long had a romance with the state's several universities.

But what started as an activist group with passionate student support for its mission - ending environmental degradation and corporate influence in government - has become a group whose very existence is being challenged for a second time in a decade.

In 1998, students at the University of Oregon - where the nation's first PIRG was born - were successful in cutting off their chapter's more than $110,000 of funding for OSPIRG, although the chapter made a comeback in 1999. Now, OSPIRG is on the chopping block again, this time at Portland State University.

In October, student government leaders at PSU announced that its OSPIRG chapter would no longer have access to its $128,000 budget allocation from student fees because the majority of that funding is spent on salaries for professional activists off campus, which doesn't meet its mandate as a "student" group. OSPIRG leaders there are trying to change its status to a student service rather than a student group to get access to that money, a model similar to the University of Oregon chapter.

But the key reasons why OSPIRG's funding are being threatened at Portland State are the same reasons why OSPIRG was nearly defeated at the University of Oregon 10 years ago, and are why animosity toward the group still lingers among some students: Mandatory student fees are being spent on salaries for professional activists based off campus, and much of the group's work is done with little transparency.

But why would a group that was once the sparkling gem of student activism and a champion of righteous causes be faced with such regular challenges?

It's all about money, visibility and tangible results.

The beginning

It was the fall of 1970, and University students gathered by the thousands in McArthur Court to listen to the blistering words of Ralph Nader. He told them they had the power to change the world. They were young, educated and ambitious - and they understood the problems afflicting the nation.

He gave them a road map to accomplish this: Hire researchers, lobbyists and scientists to do the dirty work for them. He called it a public interest research group, to be known here as Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group, and it was meant to be the ultimate coalescence of student activism, a way that spring breaks, finals and graduation would no longer hinder their momentum.

After Nader completed his speeches in Oregon, students were charged. A student ballot and a 5-4 vote of approval from the Oregon State Board of Higher Education birthed the first public interest research group in the U.S. and sparked an explosion of similar organizations on college campuses all across the state.

Why start in Oregon?

"Because the attorney general said it was OK to use student funds for purposes such as ours," Don Ross told the Emerald in 1971. Ross was a New York lawyer and "Nader Raider" who worked alongside Nader to inspire students to create OSPIRG.

On the ballot, students agreed to a mandatory $1 per term payment. Their investment: a public voice that would investigate the government and big business in hopes of offsetting the weight of corporations' deep pockets in politics.

"At the very worst, these groups would be another advocate struggling on behalf of the public," according to a 1971 OSPIRG document submitted to University administrators. "At the best it would be a force of almost revolutionary impact that could effect (sic) decision making at every level of government and in the very nerve centers of great corporations."

Students banked on the latter.

The shift in public opinion

In 1971, the Emerald's editorial board called OSPIRG "revolutionary," and "the most powerful weapon ever held in the hands of students." It said that $3 a year would buy students "a hell of a lot of muscle."

In the '70s and '80s, OSPIRG lived up to its promise, battling landlords, the Internal Revenue Service and the development of a nuclear plant on the Oregon coast.

But even with its early success, there were whispers of dissent. The Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student group, publicly denounced OSPIRG.

Randy Shaw, then the YAF chairman and a Lewis and Clark College student, said, "There is a very real possibility that OSPIRG will simply become an unresponsive bureaucracy incapable of anything constructive, but merely a parasite on the students' pocketbooks."

Other challenges came from parents who were paying their children's tuition and didn't like the idea of mandatory fees going toward an activism group.

According to one letter written by Wa. L. Huggins that was sent to then-Gov. Tom McCall and then University President Robert Clark, "I do not quarrel with OSPIRG in their aspirations, but I do feel strongly that the state board of higher education should not become involved with their financing which should be on a voluntary basis."

The group's first director, Stephen McCarthy, saw the current criticism coming.

"We had a lot going for us," he said during a telephone interview from his Portland home. "But it was a constant struggle to keep it up right."

McCarthy said the success of OSPIRG relied on the kind of attention the media gave it.

"Sometimes you'd go like two or three months without a big success and everybody starts to rumble," he said. "It's not a flawed (funding) model, but you had to be batting a thousand, and nobody does that."

The rumble gets louder

Earlier this year, former Student Sen. Neil Brown contemplated publicly calling OSPIRG's funding model - which he calls "criminal" - into question at a December Programs Finance Committee meeting.

"We have to really evaluate what OSPIRG contributes to the campus given the amount of money we spend on them," he said.

Brown suggested that support for OSPIRG was more widespread when the group was founded because the draft for the Vietnam War and environmental issues were higher priorities for students to work against.

As campuses grow more diverse and heterogeneous, it's not fair for students "to pay that kind of money to a special interest group that's advocating for a narrow set of interests," he said.

Brown says contributions to OSPIRG should be optional. This year, students are obligated to pay about $5.60 to OSPIRG through student fees.

Former Portland State OSPIRG member Claire Tripeny, who served on its board during the 2006-07 school year, doesn't think OSPIRG's funding model is equitable, even though students have legal and organizational control over OSPIRG.

"It's just not fair," Tripeny said. "We're paying people's salaries who are not on campus ... I just haven't seen any of their results affect my campus, and if we're paying for it I'd like to see it."

Although students technically have the power to cut funding to advocates, Tripeny said the advocates were present during discussions, making talk of cutting them uncomfortable.

As Tripeny's tenure in OSPIRG progressed, she and her fellow members became increasingly distressed about what they thought was an unfair and ineffective funding model. She and several others quit before the end of last school year.

"We didn't even have money to pay for flyers, and that was ridiculous," she said.

Members at the University of Oregon say the funding model is fair. They say paying for OSPIRG's roughly five advocates is crucial to its success. After all, it is the organization's founding principle.

"They're instrumental to our success," said University junior Jesse Hough, who serves on OSPIRG's board of directors. "Students making a ruckus in their area is only so effective."

On campus

In the 1970s, the number of OSPIRG groups peaked at around 12 campuses. Interest in the group slowly waned through the 1980s and it fell off Oregon State and Lewis and Clark's campuses in the 1990s. In a heated campaign to bring down OSPIRG at the University of Oregon in the spring of 1998, a group known as "Honesty Campaign," which was run by the Oregon Commentator and became OSPIRG's main opponent, was successful in defunding the group during a campus-wide vote, 55 percent to 45 percent. It was the first time OSPIRG lost funding at the University.

But OSPIRG returned to the ballot and won back its funding in the spring of 1999. Since then, the Programs Finance Committee has allocated funds to the group as a contracted service.

Now, a student government board at Portland State known as Student Activities and Leadership Programs is telling OSPIRG that it is not living up to its mission as a student group.

"It shouldn't have come as any surprise," said Aimee Shattuck, interim director of SALP. "It wasn't an, 'Oh my gosh OSPIRG doesn't fit the model.' It's been this way for years and years."

SALP has only been able to freeze OSPIRG's funding now because the board itself became more powerful and was able to question OSPIRG's mission.

SALP says OSPIRG is a corporation, not a student group, which is why it shouldn't receive student funds. Instead of going through the budget process, it could become a contract group similar to the way OSPIRG and Lane Transit District receive funding at the University of Oregon.

"I just have a lot of questions still about if it is appropriate for state money to pay a corporation for its operating costs," Shattuck said. "To me, the student fees are to fund services on campus or student organizations, and I think it would be totally appropriate for student fees to fund the chapter's portion of OSPIRG, but that's not the way that it's been structured."

The campus organizer at Portland State's OSPIRG, Katie Kleese, says the group's opponents are just misinformed.

"It came as a huge surprise to us," she said. "We've been recognized as a student group for over 30 years here, and we were very surprised by the reasons they listed because they either weren't true or were rules we had never seen."

A world without OSPIRG

Even with its controversial existence, what would Oregon look like if OSPIRG hadn't existed here?

It's hard to say. Many of OSPIRG's campaigns have ended with their desired outcomes, but whether the outcomes can be explicitly linked to OSPIRG is impossible to prove. Still, OSPIRG's list of accomplishments in 37 years is extensive, including pushing for renters' rights in Eugene and publishing a popular local handbook on the subject. It also participated in a campaign to pass the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which adjusts college loan repayments based on income.

OSPIRG alone doesn't carry as much weight as does the conglomeration of all the nation's PIRGs. Together they've been a voice in presidential elections, focused attention on credit card scams and barked about high tuition.

But if OSPIRG evaporated from the University of Oregon and Portland State University - which provide for more than two-thirds of its funding - there's a good chance much of the organization would crumble. One fewer state makes the conglomeration of PIRGs less powerful.

Even in Oregon, the conglomeration of all the state's campuses has made a bigger splash than if each were working on its own, OSPIRG members say.

"A student's life is crazy busy," said Colleen Kimball, campus organizer at the University. "You've got work, you've got school, you've got activities, but by having an OSPIRG chapter on your campus, you know there's always a staff of people working on your behalf... So the students' voices are constantly being heard."

rknutson@dailyemerald.com

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