It doesn’t seem as if anyone is sure what to do with the Iowa Student Public Interest Research Group.

After two lengthy debates within the Government of the Student Body failed to propel the group forward in the government’s funding process, ISPIRG must once again wait until next semester to attempt to apply for funding and decide whether to petition for student-funded office status.

GSB senators’ opinions have mostly remained divided on the issue — some are eager to supply ISPIRG with the $17,000 required to pay for a campus organizer, while others maintain that funding the group isn’t in the best interest of students.

What is ISPIRG and what does it do?

ISPIRG is a student chapter of the Public Interest Research Group. PIRG was founded in 1970 by consumer advocate Ralph Nader and is billed as a non-profit organization that voices the public’s concerns about problems in society to legislative bodies.

The group uses professional staff to research issues and provide leadership skills to citizens who want to participate in PIRG activism. In order to be recognized as a chapter, all student PIRG chapters must have a campus organizer who serves as the group’s professional staff and runs PIRG campaigns.

Currently, there are no established student chapters of PIRG in the state of Iowa, although Iowa State supported a student chapter of the group from 1972 to 1982.

The chapter was disbanded in 1982 because the Board of Regents voted to no longer allow the university to continue to collect funds from students through a waiveable fee process. This process allowed students to individually choose whether they wanted to pay to fund the group through extra student fees. Without the fee, funding became unstable, and the Iowa PIRG board of directors decided to disband the ISU chapter.

Concerns about ISPIRG at Iowa State

When GSB President Sophia Magill vetoed a bill during Thanksgiving break that would have made ISPIRG a student-funded office of GSB, she expressed many concerns about how the group works and how it should be funded. Mara Spooner, president of ISPIRG, said there are answers for all of Magill’s concerns.

Magill said she doesn’t believe ISPIRG should be a student-funded office because it does not provide an essential service to all students and are not supported by the greater student body.

“From talking to students, essential services are the student-funded offices right now, she said. “On a daily basis, students could go to student legal services and get services immediately. I don’t feel the average student sees the direct correlation as easily with PIRG.”

Spooner said ISPIRG does not provide an essential service to all students, but the services it provides directly benefits them.

She said ISPIRG has about 250 volunteers who have already seen the group’s value because they learned skills from working within it.

Magill said existing organizations on campus — like GSB — can accomplish many of the things ISPIRG wants to do; therefore, spending money to fund a campus organizer isn’t necessary.

One of the ways Magill said existing organizations could do the work is through ISPIRG as a student organization, which Spooner said is only possible because of the professional training group members received from Seth Landau, campus organizer for the New Voters Project.

Also, Magill said, if ISPIRG were to pay for a campus organizer with GSB funds, the government would not have control over the organizer who would be hired through Iowa PIRG. Spooner said that wasn’t exactly true.

“If any student works with this director and feels they are ineffective, they can let us know, and we will tell state PIRG board to send us a new organizer,” Spooner said.

It is difficult since PIRG is a national organization, Magill said, for ISPIRG to control what is happening with the national agenda, making it automatically less focused on the overlapping ISU and Ames communities.

Spooner said other PIRGs’ agendas would not affect ISPIRG.

“We would run campaigns that are in broad interest to the student body,” she said.

ISPIRG also hasn’t been at Iowa State long enough to have proven itself as a successful organization, Magill said. Spooner said the group may not have been around for a long time now, but it was once successful on campus and can be again.

“By giving us student-funded office status, the senate was saying, ‘We think PIRG deserves this,'” she said. “It’s painfully obvious we haven’t been around a lot recently, but it was because we’ve been trying too hard to get established.”

PIRG at other schools

Student chapters of PIRG serve more than 50 campuses in 12 states. These student chapters are funded in a variety of ways through students attending the university.

At Indiana University-Bloomington, the university’s student PIRG chapter, INPIRG, is funded only through its members, said Jesse Laffen, vice president of administration for the Indiana University Student Association.

“Students sign up for the group’s e-mail list and are charged $5 a semester on their tuition bill,” he said. “INPIRG has done very well here, but I know there are students who question how the group is thriving … the university is just assuming PIRG is holding up their end of the deal with keeping 10 percent student body membership. I don’t think anyone really checks.”

The University of New Mexico’s student PIRG chapter is no longer officially recognized because its student government, the Associated Students of the University of New Mexico, took away the chapter’s campus organizer funding in the spring of 2004, said ASUNM president Kevin Stevenson.

“We had complaints from students that that person was never in the office and they couldn’t get ahold of him,” he said.

Stevenson said the group still receives funding through the student government.

“They’re treated just like any other campus club or organization,” he said. “No big exceptions have been made to give money to PIRG or take it away from them.”

Other schools, like Colorado State University, no longer have student PIRG chapters. Cord Brundage, former senator for the Associated Students of Colorado State University, said they had run into issues with how to fund the group that resulted in its eventual disbanding. When CoPIRG was created at Colorado State, Brundage said, it was created with a negative check-off system, which meant students had to indicate if they didn’t want to fund the group.

“The state later said it didn’t think a negative check-off system was appropriate — that a positive check-off system was better,” he said.

Brundage said CoPIRG wasn’t sure if it could make enough money it needed to be self-sufficient through a positive check-off system, so it became a student organization and requested money through the student government.

What the future holds for ISPIRG

ISPIRG’s leadership is awaiting a sign from GSB executives about what the group should do in the coming semester, said Spooner.

“We’re meeting with Sophie to discuss what to do with activism on campus in the future,” Spooner said. “We all just need to find out how that would involve the existing leadership of PIRG.”

Magill said she is interested in making activism a larger part of GSB’s operations, whether that would be through GSB, ISPIRG or a combination of the two.

“It’s really not a question of what I am going to do, but what we as students want to see happen with activism at Iowa State,” she said.

— Daily staff reports contributed to this article.