Milestones: Students form a public interest research group

We’re gonna need a bigger room

It’s 1970. Many college students are looking for new ways to make a difference in the lives of Americans who are still at war in Vietnam and at odds with each other over the war and many other issues.

At the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ralph Nader, the crusading attorney, has just finished a well-attended lecture. Nader, along with his young associates Donald Ross and Jim Welch, has planned a smaller meeting to follow the lecture to discuss a new idea: adapting Nader’s unique brand of advocacy for college campuses. by forming a student-directed, student-funded public interest research group.

They book a room that night that holds 150 people. But they’re certain they won’t fill it, not late on a Friday night on a raucous college campus.

They’re proven wrong when 500 students show up.

Within a year, state college and university officials have approved the creation of the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) at all seven of of the system’s campuses. So begins a model of campus-based social action that will last for 50 more years (and counting) and be adopted by students at dozens of other colleges and universities in Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, California, Missouri and other states across the country.

Checking prices, walking streams, uncovering shady practices

From the beginning, student involvement in PIRG chapters takes many forms.

In Oregon, PIRG student volunteers bring cars in good condition to local garages and reveal which crooked shops tell the students they need phantom repairs. In California, PIRG students conduct price surveys at local grocery stores and publicize the results (an especially helpful tool for shoppers in the days before the internet).

In New Jersey, student Streamwalkers don hip waders and check pollution discharges against state permits. By 1980, NJPIRG has more people monitoring the state’s rivers and streams than all of New Jersey’s public agencies combined.

In 1975, CALPIRG volunteer and law student George Schultz’s investigations help expose a major price-fixing scandal within the state’s beef industry. Schultz’s project involves undercover industry contacts dubbed “meat throats,” the theft of case files from our lawyer’s office, testimony before Congress, a class-action lawsuit, an appearance on “60 Minutes,” and, in a victory for consumers, 13 convictions in the industry.

As the years go by, tens of thousands of student PIRG volunteers conduct more research and investigations, compile and release reports and consumer guides, set up consumer hotlines, earn attention in the news media, lobby public officials, collect signatures on initiative and other petitions, speak with community groups, organize service projects to help the hungry and homeless, and much more. Given the educational value of many of these projects, thousands of students earn course credit as they learn the skills and value of civic engagement.

Special interests push back

Whenever some people push for social change, other people push back.

In 1979, College Republicans sue New Jersey PIRG chapters at Rutgers University, over its funding by student fees — even though students approved the creation of the PIRG fee in a campus-wide vote. The suit, as well as similar legal challenges, fails.

In 1995, legislation is filed in Congress to prohibit federal funding for colleges that employ the funding system used by many student PIRGs. Dubbing the provision the “campus gag rule,” PIRG students and organizers successfully persuade Congress to defeat the measure as an infringement of students’ rights to free speech and free assembly.