The MassPIRG fee on your semester bill is not mandatory. You are not required to pay $7 to MassPIRG at any time in order to be a student at the University of Massachusetts. However, in order to not donate your $7 to the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group each semester, you are required to check off a box on the back of your bill and subtract this amount from your total tab, thus waiving the fee.

This is known as a negative check-off system, as opposed to a positive check-off system in which you check off the campus organizations you would like to help fund via a donation. All UMass students are automatically billed for a contribution to MassPIRG unless they make the effort to waive the fee. Negative check-off fees are manipulative. The MassPIRG, and all other waivable fees that appear on a student’s bill should be positive check-off only.

If upon signing up for phone service the company automatically added to your bill a $7 “donation” to Organization X you would, enraged, insist that they discontinue this practice on your monthly statements. Why is it that MassPIRG is allowed to automatically charge students a fee? Should departments on campus, such as languages and athletics also charge automatic fees to increase their budgets?

MassPIRG, according to its Web site, is a “statewide, student directed and funded organization that works on environmental, consumer protection, and democracy issues.” Its mission, it says, is to act as a “watchdog for special interests like big banks, oil companies, and auto companies, to hold our politicians accountable, and to ensure that our interests as citizens are protected.” However, by automatically billing the possibly impoverished student $7 each semester, MassPIRG is looking out for no one but MassPIRG.

MassPIRG was begun at UMass Amherst and Hampshire College in 1971. A campus wide vote by the 1972 student body at UMass Amherst approved and instituted the collection of a mandatory fee added to students’ bills as a line item. Every two years the campus votes during spring student government elections to continue this tradition of a negative check-off fee or change the practice. Any organization can go through the referendum process with the SGA and add its waivable fee to our bills. Currently, the only other organization that has does so is the campus childcare center.

The childcare center’s $1 fee each semester, although also a negative check-off, waivable fee, is at least a direct deposit to a campus program directly affecting students, staff and faculty. If you choose to pay this small fee, you contribute to the daycare center (ravaged by budget cuts) on the UMass Amherst campus. This center provides childcare for students who are also parents and could not afford daycare otherwise, as well as for the children of offensively underpaid faculty and staff. MassPIRG fees are pooled with fees collected from the 23 separate campus chapters. The fee does not effectively contribute directly to a cause on the Amherst campus.

Furthermore, MassPIRG will only establish a chapter on a college campus when the student body has approved the payment of the $7 waivable fee per semester per student. MassPIRG refuses to reside on campuses that do not support their existence through a negative check-off fee imposed unjustly on students.

It is true that if the MassPIRG fee were a positive check-off, or essentially a true donation, their funding would drop. Less people would virtuously donate than the number of people who are currently duped into paying the waivable fee. However, this is not a reason to continue to allow MassPIRG, or any organization, to have a negative check-off fee.

In addition to being confusing, the negative check-off fee is one more complication to the already tedious UMass bill.

S.J. Port is a Collegian columnist.