End of the Road for WPIRG

Surprise, surprise. WPIRG's existence is under threat again. On Wednesday the Federation of Students will decide whether to hold a referendum to make the WPIRG fee opt-in. This will be portrayed as giving students some choice over their supplementary fees, but in reality it is a referendum on WPIRG's existence. Few people opt out of the fee each term, and few people will opt in. Without its funding of $4.75 per term from every undergraduate, the organization will fold and the naive libertarians on Reddit will have their victory.

If this challenge to WPIRG's existence does not succeed then there will be another one in a few years, and if that fails then there will be another one a few years after that. WPIRG's time on this earth is extremely limited, and I have mixed feelings about that.

I am not very happy with WPIRG these days, and am not that interested in writing a long, well-researched defence of them. I want to get some stuff off my chest, and in doing so I will spout some (inadvertent) inaccuracies, and I will speak in more unkind terms about the assorted parties than is expedient. You have been warned.

Background

Here's a bit of context: WPIRG stands for the Waterloo Public Interest Research Group. Despite the name, in practice they are an organization that engages in lefty activist causes for "social and environmental justice". They tend towards radicalism and tend to attract radicals, but many people's interactions (including mine) with the organization are more moderate. Their mandate is to work with undergraduates, since undergraduates pay for them. Unlike the Federation of Students, they are not limited to campus activities or causes.

WPIRG lives in a weird gray zone within the University of Waterloo. They are funded by a $4.75 levy charged to every undergraduate student every term. This levy is refundable, but as far as I know this requires showing up in person at the WPIRG office (this used to be the case, anyways). They are not an official university organization, however, and they are independent from the Federation of Students.

WPIRG has been around since the 1970s (1971?). It was inspired by Ralph Nader when he went on a tour encouraging students to set up "public interest research groups". I believe WPIRG was one of the first such groups established in Ontario, and it was one of the best funded. There are other PIRGs, including a relatively recent one at Wilfrid Laurier called LSPIRG.

The Campus Conservatives hate WPIRG because they hate left wingers and hate taxes; it burns them up to think that leftist radicals are funded to organize on campus. Other naive libertarians hate that the fee is opt-in instead of opt-out. Many other students (I would wager the majority) do not care much one way or another. Compared to other student fees (especially the ridiculous Federation of Students fee) the WPIRG fee is trivial.

I have known about WPIRG since I was living in Toronto. The existence of WPIRG was one of the reasons I chose to do grad school at the University of Waterloo. I am no longer involved with them, but I have been involved in various ways over the years:

I have attended lots of their talks and events.
I volunteered for Recycle Cycles starting in 2000, which at that time was transitioning from being a WPIRG group to a Working Centre project.
I ran some simplicity circles and canning events organized through WPIRG in the early 2000s (2002? 2003?).
I was paid to process student refunds one term (maybe fall of 2006?)
I ran a couple of courses for the KW Freeskool project.
I took over organizing duties of a group called the Internet Collective, which did volunteer IT maintenance of the WPIRG infrastructure, and kept doing this until 2007 or so.
I was involved with the UW Community Garden, which was nominally a WPIRG project.
I was peripherally involved with the WPIRG referendum launched by Nic Weber.

Every few years there are threats to WPIRG's existence. Some research would be helpful, but here is what I remember off the top of my head:

In 2005 or so a student named Nic Weber launched a campaign to defund WPIRG via referendum. He got his referendum, and it seemed to me that he was going to win. Then some of the pro-WPIRG campaigners took a photograph of a referendum violation: an anti-WPIRG poster was taped over a pro-WPIRG one, thus occluding it. On this basis the referendum was cancelled.
WPIRG used to have a nice office on the second floor of the Student Life Centre (SLC). The Federation of Students (which operates the SLC) terminated their lease and rented them a much smaller room on the third floor of the SLC.
A few years later the Federation of Students kicked WPIRG out of the third floor of the SLC and left them homeless. They eventually made arrangements to rent (?) space out of Conrad Grebel College, but the office is tiny and not even big enough to hold all their staff.
A number of campus Conservative groups had a meeting to strategize about defunding PIRGs. Former MP Peter Braid attended and spoke at this meeting (but it may have been before he was elected?). Somebody taped the meeting and leaked the details. This was called "PIRGgate", and made it clear that campus Conservatives were at war with PIRGs.
A few years ago (2013?) a student once again proposed a referendum to review WPIRG funding. A lot of pro-WPIRG people showed up and filibustered, and the referendum did not happen.

The Thesis

WPIRG has done a few worthwhile things in the time I have known them, but they have largely squandered the great gift of their funding.
Institutionally I feel they are an overly bureaucratic and ineffective organization. I vacillate about this, but I largely feel they do not deserve to survive.
Despite these things, the campus and community at large will be worse off once they are defunded and defunct.

Why WPIRG Should Exist

WPIRG exists to advocate for social and environmental justice issues. Sometimes they do a good job of this. They are never popular (because at their best they take on the leading edge of activism) but they are often important.
They provide a way for those interested in social and environmental justice to meet each other and work together on shared projects. A lot of these projects are useless or worse than useless, but these people then form a social circle that goes on to do good things. I have seen this again and again.
The people who get involved with WPIRG often graduate to the broader KW community and continue their work for a variety of nonprofit and for-profit organizations. There is a network of people doing interesting things who have passed through WPIRG in one way or another.
Unlike the Federation of Students, WPIRG activities are not limited to campus. Sometimes this matters a lot. Students tend to live in a campus bubble, and holding activities that get these students involved in the broader community increases the chances that they will settle down here after graduation.
As far as I know there is no effective, student-driven opposition to the Federation of Students other than Imprint (which is also under threat) and WPIRG. The university administation gets involved from time to time (does the University still manage Federation Hall?) but that is not student driven.

Some of WPIRG's successes

Taking on indigenous activism, which has now gone mainstream but was pretty radical when WPIRG was doing it. Similarly it has done important (although largely ignored) activism on migrant workers and Canadian mining companies. This divestment brouhaha might be in the category of "things that seem wacky now but might be mainstream in a few years."
There was an amazing lecture series in the early 2000s called "2020: Envisioning the Future". I remember Ken Dryden being one of the speakers, but there were several more.
More generally, WPIRG serves as a stop for the radicalist lecture speaker circuit, and in doing so they have brought a lot of interesting speakers to campus. There have been big names like David Suzuki, but a lot of smaller ones as well. I have been particularly interested in speakers from other countries coming to Canada and describing conditions in their home countries. (Some talks by speakers from Chiapas and Honduras stick in my memory.) My association with the Ugunja Community Resource Centre stems from a talk sponsored by WPIRG.
Organizing the Rainbow Reels film festival, which in 2016 seems like no big deal, but in the early 2000s was much more radical and much more of a gathering point for LGBT people.
Getting involved with on-campus activism relevant to students: in particular Federation of Student fee increases, and the way students were ripped off by Schembri Apartments. In the past they have also attempted to set up rental review websites. Note that something like the Schembri situation illustrates that WPIRG does not have to be valuable to all students at all times: the fact that the organization was there to advocate for the specific students affected by the unfinished apartments is insurance to others.
On a similar note, the KW Solidarity Network has been weirdly effective at challenging bad landlords locally. This counts for something.
Recycle Cycles started as a WPIRG project. I do not think it would have survived as a WPIRG project in the long term, but it turned out to be a fantastic community asset and one of the Working Centre's greatest success stories. It is now nearly self-funding. It is also qualitatively different from the UW Bike Shop and other for-profit bike stores in the region.
Food Not Bombs is kind of disappointing (for a group that preaches anti-oppression they are blissfully unaware of just how patronizing they can be towards the poor) but at least the action group has stability and gets students in the community in a concrete way.

What WPIRG Gets Wrong

The organization pays three staff members $40k per year, and those staff members are largely ineffective and unresponsive to the needs of their action groups. They are interested in their pet projects (eg Rainbow Reels and the PIRG conference) but they largely neglect their action groups.
As a result, their action groups don't last long. There are not good transitions for leadership when the founders burn out or graduate. Most action groups fall apart by the middle of term when midterms and assignments start, and WPIRG just throws its figurative hands up in the air and claims to be powerless over this.
There is way too much turnover among the staff. The whole purpose behind paying somebody $40k per year is so they will stick around and provide institutional memory for the students, who cycle out every five years. But that does not happen very effectively at WPIRG. MathNEWS probably does a better job of this.
WPIRG is STILL largely invisible in the university community, despite warning after warning that they cannot stay funded without students being aware of what they do. But the attitude seems to be that the core group of 20-100 radical volunteers on campus are the primary audience, and everybody else on campus is apathetic or irrelevant.
The organization is petty and bureaucratic, with its anti-oppression trainings and forms and budgets and enforced consensus decision making. I understand that they are trying to enforce standards of anti-oppression, but they do so at the expense of actually getting anything done. I am sure that the WPIRG staff would argue that I have been largely uncooperative in participating in their petty bureaucracy, but I would fire back that I have participated in a lot of things (write-ups, publicity, recruitment meetings) that ACTUALLY make a difference to what was important.
So many of their causes are actively harmful to society, and the activists have no compunctions about twisting facts to emotionally manipulate the public. (WPIRG is getting a taste of its own medicine now.)
The way they use money often looks really bad. One of the big talking points in Nic Weber's campaign was that WPIRG contributes (contributed?) a lot of money to a provincial PIRG fund; Weber characterized these as "union dues". The fact that WPIRG pays for three full-time staff when their office barely holds three people bugs me, and the amount of productivity I have seen out of those staff has been disappointing. WPIRG does not appear to be doing dramatically more with three staff members than they were with two. Meanwhile their action groups get the princely sum of $200 per term. Supposedly the community garden had $800 budgeted for it last year, but we apparently spent $150 of that, and most years we were spending less.

How to Help WPIRG

If you are interested in campaigning for WPIRG's continued existence then here are some suggestions:

The argument that the WPIRG fee has increased "300%" is laughable compared to the degree that other campus fees have increased. Plot a graph of tuition fees, Federation of Student fees, faculty student association fees, and UPass fees against the WPIRG fee and you will demonstrate this. Having somebody argue why paying $4.75 is immoral while the Federation of Students increases fees year after year for its own ever-expanding empire is a tough sell.
For crying out loud get more undergraduates involved in WPIRG activities. That was my goal throughout all of my WPIRG activities, but I never got anywhere. Maybe you can do a better job. The more undergrads (not just leftist radical undergrads) who participate in WPIRG activities, the better it will be able to withstand these challenges.
To be brutally honest, most of the successful action groups are not powered by undergraduates, but by community members and grad students. Somebody should find out how to get the Graduate Student Association to add a $4.75 levy to its student fees. This will never happen, but it ought to.
Identify the ways in which WPIRG has been effective (even as a countervailing force to the Federation of Students) and present that information honestly.

What Makes Me Mad

The underlying ideology that all taxes are bad and that opt-out fees are immoral drives me up the wall. There are a bunch of entitled students who genuinely feel it is a moral outrage to pool $4.75 of their money towards a cause that does not benefit them directly. Other levies do not benefit them directly (eg the WUSC fee for sponsoring refugee students) but that does not come under scrutiny. Meanwhile a lot of these techie advocates happily run off to Silicon Valley without nary a thought to the taxes that got them there, or with any loyalty in paying back the debts that go beyond their student loans.
I am mad at the Federation of Students for ripping off WPIRG again and again. There has been bad blood between the organizations since I have been on campus, and the Federation of Students almost always gets its way. The fact that the Federation of Students gets to decide whether WPIRG goes under referendum is itself troubling, given the conflict of interest between the organizations.
I am mad at the Federation of Students overall for being an ineffective organization in its own right. It worries me that there is no effective opposition to its institutional power.
This argument that the Federation of Students will take over WPIRG's core functionalities is nonsense. Look at the University of Waterloo Sustainability Project (UWSP), which has its own office (in the SLC, natch) and is a Federation of Students project. Other than soliciting a bunch of student end-of-term reports that sit on a shelf, has it accomplished anything practical ever? WPIRG is not that effective either, but it is more effective than that.
There is no mechanism for WPIRG to defend itself in the long term. Even if WPIRG was to miraculously get through this referendum process and even if it was able to miraculously demonstrate its relevance to most of the student population, there would still be a sufficient number of students disgruntled by the WPIRG fee to launch another referendum challenge in a few years. This will happen ad infinitum until WPIRG is dead. There is no way to say "enough is enough".
The small-mindedness of the anti-WPIRG people gets my goat. Sure: WPIRG is ineffective and maybe should go away, but it is a lot easier to tear institutions down than to bring them up, and none of these anti-WPIRG activists have plans to replace the organization with something better.
WPIRG has shot itself in the foot again and again. They have squandered their resources again and again. They know they have to be relevant to students, but so often they let opportunities to do so pass them by. I know they have tried to make improvements to their outreach in recent years, but I do not know that they have been that effective. I guess we will see when/if this referendum challenge is resolved.