PIRG’s niche?
In the aftermath of the PIRG ballot measure, I think as students must ask ourselves the question: Was PIRG well-defined enough? Questions were left unanswered here and I think many students, including myself as a Polytechnic student, had questions regarding who they were. Again my opinions stem from what I have observed here at Polytechnic.
When it comes to running a successful organization, you must understand your niche. In this case, I think this where most students would say they had questions. One question that kept coming up in the campaign was, “How are you different than ASA?” This does bring up a good point, since PIRG does and has worked on textbooks and tuition, but so does ASA. In the case of Polytechnic, PIRG did work on many occasions with ASA on voter registration.
PIRG has demonstrated work on environmental issues and also transportation. The question here is, why can’t groups like Green Team and other already registered student organizations work on sustainability campaigns for ASU?
On the transportation side we already have a Transportation Advisory Board that was step up this year to specifically tackle transportation needs of students, why not let them tackle the issues?
I think the niche overall wasn’t understood and maybe PIRG has still yet to find its niche at ASU. Let me be clear, I think we can all agree that tuition, environmental issues, transportation, textbook reform and other higher educational issues are important, but the question here is, do we already have organizations that can work on them? If the [answer] is yes, why not support what we already have?
Matt McCoy
Undergraduate