MassPIRG's Histroy

Ralph Nader is in many ways singularly responsible for the create of the Student Public Interest Research Groups. As chronicled in the Proposal to establish the Western Mass Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst1, Nader held a series of lectures around the Oregon colleges in 1971. In these speeches, Nader argued for the creation of a “a student-financed, student-controlled staff of full-time professionals which would work to solve the problems existing in society today” (par 1).

A few months after Nader's speaking tour, Oregon adopted the first PRIG when seven of Oregon State's campuses held votes to petition the Oregon State Board of Higher Education to establish a waivable fee funding system. Minnesota's seventeen campus followed in suit with similar votes, then Vermont. Despite Mr. Nader's clear influence, there is a clear priority in ensuring that there is no confusion between his inspiration and the actual governance of the PIRGs. “Mr. Nader has exercised no control over the development of any PIRG,” the WMPIRG founder's write, “and will exercise no control in the future” (par 4). The creation of WMPIRG, which would eventually become known as MassPIRG, was similar. From the founding charter:

“In early October [of 1971] with the encouragement of Mr. Donald Ross, a lawyer form Nader's Washington office, and the support of the Connecticut Valley Committee, a five-college are[a] recipient of a Rockefeller foundation grant, students from twenty colleges in Western Massachusetts met to begin organizational work for the establishment of a Western Massachusetts Public Interest Group (WMPIRG). This group of students decided to conduct a petition referendum to demonstrate student support for WMPIRG” (par 5)

By March of 1972, a “majority of students of the University of Massachusetts (54%) had signed the WMPIRG petition. Several faculty members as well as Chancellor Bromery have voiced their approval and support of the WMPIRG concept and funding procedure” (par 10). WMPIRG's status then became official on May 26th, 1972 when the Board of Trustees voted to approve both the organization and it's funding mechanism, a $2 waivable fee.

Now that we have a better grasp of the historical factors that created MassPIRG, as well as the intellectual heritage that underlies it, we can now turn to the the technical aspects of organizing of how they play into the organization's recruitment model.

The Template: Black Power Movement

Without the Black Power movement, there would most likely would not have been a student power movement. One former activist, Henry Mayer writes:

The demand for “student power” was first raised during Berkeley’s second student strike in 1966 as conscious imitation of the cry for “black power.” I make such a precise historical assertion, not only because I participated in that strike and remember the spirit of novelty, passion and the self-conscious belligerence with which we took up this variation of the black power slogan (then it it's first months of notoriety), but because its emotional roots in the civil rights struggle provide some helpful perspectives in understanding what 'student power' means” (in Schwartz 26, emphasis mine)

The most iconic images of the black power movement, of course, conjure giants like Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X. But white, high school and college age young adults made numerous contributions to the movement in the 'trenches' of organizing. For example, in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, the “Student nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters and raises civil-rights awareness in the Deep South” (Gladwell par 10).

By working for black power organizations like the NAACP and the SNCC, white students where not only able to channel their professed disaffection with mainstream culture, but also learned important organizing skills. For example, the same Freedom Summer that relied on white students was “crucially,” in Gladwell's words, “strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures” (par 19).

Just as the Black Power Movement created a vocabulary, it also set up a structural model of how to fight and subvert a social establishment. Now we can see how the context of the 1960s and 70s gave students both the intellectual grounding, though the vast expansions in enrollment, and organizational tools required to begin a mass movement, with student's participation in the Black Power campaigns. We will now look at the movements resulted from this context; specifically, the New Left and the anti-war movement.

Student Power: First Wave

In contemporary America, the immediate transition from high school to college is becoming more and more common. According the the NCES, this trend really began in about 1980, when overall enrollment rates rose from their stable trend of 50%. This trend reached it's peak at 67% in 1997. And while "declined through 2001 to 62 percent before increasing to 69% in 2008" SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2010). The Condition of Education 2010 (NCES 2010-028), Indicator 21.

This proliferation of the bachelor degree has kind of pro-cyclical effect, where attaining a B.A. becomes more and more necessary to gain a minimum income that pays enough to ensure the middle-class lifestyle, such as giving once's one's children a college education.

The roots of this trend are traced to “the mid-1950s,” writes historian Eric Foner, “there were 2.7 million college students. By 1968, thanks to the coming of age of the baby boom generation and the explosion of institutions of higher learning that accompanied it, the number had risen to over 7 million” (288). Slowly, as a demand for higher education grew so did the supply of institutions. This trend allowed for better self-selection and choice for students; and, as this dynamic has persisted, the relationship between students and the education institutions that attend has become less paternalistic and more attuned to student's demands as consumers. As a result, students now enjoy much more choice, autonomy and empowerment at their universities.

But in the 1960s and 70s, this was not the case. The increasing number of students enrolling into colleges and universities grew at an astounding rate, much faster than new current institutions could manage. For context, by 19xx, university students outpaced farmers, miners and steelworkers in their proportion to America's overall demographics (Foner 288). Clearly, institutions of higher learning could not adapt to the influx right away.

This is important because this directly contributes to what would become the student power movment. The epicenter of the this new wave of activist students was, in the words of historian Eric Foner, the “quintessential Cold War 'megaversity,' Berkeley, which was an immense, impersonal institutions where enrollments in many classes approached one thousand students (290).

Understandably, many students reacted negatively to, in the words of activist Joel R. Kramer "the typical university is only slightly more democratic than the Army, if less unpleasant" (13). Both at Berkeley and other large state universities, “students spoke of loneliness, isolation and alienation, of powerlessness in the face of bureaucratic institutions, of a hunger or authenticity that affluence could not state” (Foner 288-89). But, the anger and anguish among this especially among young and relatively carefree set of individuals was unfocused and not entirely new.
Pockets of student radicalism have emerged in numerous times of crises. For example, in the Thirties, “there was intense student protests related to the deepening political-economic crises in Europe and the United States,” explains political scientist James Woods (xv). What set the student power movement of the 60s and 70s apart, and what makes this history so important for our understanding of MassPIRG today, is not just the student disaffection itself; but how the political context of the time channeled these feelings into serious action. As Walter Laqueur explains, "Youth movements have come and gone, but never before has one been taken so seriously" (19).

What made the student power movement so regarded not only in the context of the ear, but also today, requires some unpacking. The demographics factors described above were a direct cause for the motivations of the student-power movements, but it was the Black Power Movement that paved the way, giving student power activists both the vocabulary and a template for the eventual movement.

History: Introduction

To understand structure of MassPIRGs models, we have to have a grasp of what ideas and events shaped it.

Starting a discussion on MassPIRG's recruitment model, and the student experience with it, begins with the history of student activism. This is for three primary reasons. The first relates to how the record of student activism is portrayed by MassPIRG staff, especially for the purposes of recruitment and motivation. The second, more pertinent reason relates to how the historical context of student power plays directly into how recruited and non-recruited students perceive MassPIRG during the recruitment process. Lastly, the history of student activism still very much defines the contours of how the politicized students I interviews orient their relationship with the institution itself.

The history of student activism is immediately important because of MassPIRG's own aggressive promotion of it, particularly by making positive linkages between their current program work that they ask volunteers carry out, with victories scored in prior waves of student movements. Examples of this can be seen clearly the rhetoric of organizers, as well as campaign literature. The reasons for these linkages were clearly motivational in design to attract interested students. When asked why she decided to join MassPIRG over other Human Rights groups, one Save Dafur volunteer explained: "They make it seem like they have this pre-packaged, amazing [campaign] that MassPIRG knows exactly how to get this done. You just have to do it, it's not that difficult" (Jessie 5:00-5:20). But more than just projecting competence, MassPIRG is able to inspire students to make deeper commitments with the organization by aligning their current program work with the earlier student activists movements. This makes an abundance of sense, as many students join MassPIRG with the ideal of contributing to these very goals. By making linkages with past successes in social change to the current program work, students become more motivated by perceiving themselves as links in a chain of forward-thinking pioneers and public interest advocates.

However, the history of student activism itself complicated, and it's legacy is still quite contentious. The reason why this contention is important, is because individual students often draw their perceptions of MassPIRG, and more broadly student activism and social change movements, from their own opinions of the 1960s. For example, Paul Loeb writes in his book Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus, he explains how students often

"

[feel] unequivocally hostile to attempts at social change. When I [Loeb] suggested Vietnam-era efforts had made a difference, they called them self-indulgent, misguided and ineffective. The protesting, they said, made the war longer and spat on innocent soldiers caught in the middle" (14)

Similarly, students at UMass-Amherst have expressed negative views about the organization and to this author during his work as a MassPIRG volunteer. For example, in my field notes from my Spring 2010 recruitment drive, one student wrote "Die Hippie die," under his name on a recruitment card. As such, working on a MassPIRG recruitment drive, and being recruited yourself, requires a level of reconciliation with the history of student-activism with your personal political orientation. In someways, it is used as a cudgel by student's peers to take ownership for the worst of the excesses of 1960s and 1970s radicals. Conversely, it can be the foundation for the willpower students need to persist in their subversion of an inequitable status quo.

Clearly, the history of student activism is a double edged sword. But how does this relate to the underlying question of the recruitment model, and the student experience? This third, and final way history is pertinent to our investigation of MassPIRG's recruitment model is that it defines the student/institution relationship. As we'll see further in our explanation of the history itself, much of the methods, tactics and very vocabulary of MassPIRG itself is modeled by historical factors. In short, to understand structure of MassPIRG's recruitment model, we have to have a grasp of what ideas and events shaped that it.