A UCLA student can instantly recognize the signs: clipboard, orange stickers on back pockets, pen in hand, the false cheer in the voice.
“Hi, how are you doing today?”
Of course, the real question is the dreadful one that immediately follows: “Have you pledged CALPIRG yet?”
The California Public Interest Research Group is currently in the midst of a massive membership drive, with a goal of pledging thousands of Bruins in order to “Save CALPIRG.”
But who is to say that CALPIRG deserves our money?
When an institution demands its participants pay five dollars a quarter to subsidize its existence, it should offer something tangible in return.
Alex Jeffries, a third-year Spanish student, summed up the fundamental flaw in CALPIRG’s strategy.
“I can’t understand how it is effective marketing to antagonize an entire campus for a questionable cause. Every single person I know tries to avoid the CALPIRG canvassers,” Jeffries said.
When it comes to CALPIRG, all we (the students they are supposedly fighting for) receive are bloated claims of influence (“We passed Proposition 1!”) and failed attempts at real reform (false claims of textbook cost abatement).
Perhaps the most immediate example of CALPIRG’s penchant for inflated self-praise is its textbook-affordability campaign. CALPIRG’s national Web site employs a sort of bait-and-switch diction that pretends to highlight real reform while really just regurgitating trite political maxims. Consider the following description of new congressional bills backed by the organization:
“The House bill includes language to make textbooks more affordable by mandating that publishers provide the price of textbooks when they market them to faculty. … CALPIRG is urging Congress to include mandatory price disclosure in the final bill that Congress sends to the president.”
At first glance this may look like the path to reasonable textbook prices. But look again. All that means is that the House makes publishing companies tell faculty just how much they will railroad students for (and it has not even made it to the final bill yet).
Essentially, the textbook reform touted around our campus as evidence of CALPIRG’s legitimacy and worthiness is nothing more than another bureaucratic step in the politics of textbook publication. Obviously a publishing house will charge as much as it can for a book. It’s a business. Businesses do not care what student groups tell them about their prices, and Congress will pass or not pass this bill with or without CALPIRG.
This sort of false achievement is consistent across CALPIRG’s endeavors. Voter registration drives are clearly laudable, but why should students have to pay for them? From MTV to local city government to any number of other non-student-funded entities, a cornucopia of get-out-the-vote drives already exist.
And while this particular interest group is proud to have a section on its Web site entitled “World Class Public Transit,” it would be ridiculous to presume that CALPIRG has more influence in this matter than the million- (if not billion-) dollar transportation industry in this nation.
Of course, this is all without mention of CALPIRG’s biggest wasted resource: manpower. The hours committed by the organization’s canvassers on our own campus alone could be applied to a body of volunteer work that could revitalize Los Angeles. Instead, it is used to nag people who do not have the golden ticket of CALPIRG avoidance, an orange sticker.
This is not to say that CALPIRG is not at least theoretically important. Our democracy systematically depends on interest groups and lobbyists, and groups like CALPIRG have a right to exist. But they should not pretend to be above or outside of the system, and we do not have to fund them.
So if you, like most students, go through an involuntary mental checklist of options when you see a canvasser from afar (you reach for your phone and pretend to be engrossed in a serious conversation; when this fails, you say you really must get to class, but they walk with you), do not feel guilty.
After all, CALPIRG’s unofficial attitude seems to be summed up by the title of one of U.S. PIRG’s myriad Facebook groups, “F*** Y’All, I’m With PIRG!”
Maybe we should have seen it coming. CALPIRG’s name includes the words “Public Interest Group.” Its motto is “Standing Up to Powerful Interests.” This implies that it is a less powerful lobby than its opponents, which begs the question: Why would we fund it?
Tired of CALPIRG harassment ruining your day? E-mail Makarechi at kmakarechi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.