It’s a day of firsts for the three-member panel appointed to examine an MSU police undercover investigation of a campus activist group.

When the committee, appointed last week by MSU President M. Peter McPherson, meets at 6:30 p.m. today in the Union Ballroom, it will be the first time its members - which include an MSU professor, a former state representative and a former MSU trustee - have been in the same room.

It’s the first time they have discussed the case.

And it’s the first time any of the three has been officially presented with information about the infiltration of Students for Economic Justice.

“The only information I have at this point is my file of clippings from the newspaper,” said panel member Norman Abeles, an MSU psychology professor. “I have no other information.”

For months beginning Feb. 19, 2000, MSU police used an undercover officer to gather information about Students for Economic Justice, a campus group that’s focused much of its attention on labor practices of university apparel-makers.

The student group uncovered the operation in January after seeing the police officer on campus in uniform.

University officials have said the investigation was spurred by fears that protests by the activist group could turn violent like those in Seattle months earlier and a February 2000 sit-in at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Those fears were heightened, officials say, when marches against the World Bank in Washington, D.C., turned violent in April 2000 - at about the same time World Bank President James Wolfensohn was announced as the speaker for May commencement.

And, last week, campus officials tied the investigation of Students for Economic Justice to the New Year’s Eve 1999 arson of Agriculture Hall, but declined to provide further information citing restrictions by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

It will be the job of the independent panel - which includes Abeles, former Lansing state Rep. Lynne Martinez and former Trustee Russell Mawby - to examine those reasons, as well as the policies of MSU police, and issue a public report within 100 days.

Martinez, now the director of the Capital Area Youth Alliance, and Mawby, chairman emeritus of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Abeles, who serves as chairman of the Executive Committee of Academic Council, said the group has had little time to inquire about the investigation or communicate with each other since the panel was quickly assembled last week.

He said it was essential that the panel hold a public meeting before students leave campus for the summer. Panel members will be accepting public comment at tonight’s meeting, and will be accepting written comments as well.

“My effort is to listen and learn,” Abeles said. “We’re going to meet afterward to see where to go from there.”

Whatever the committee decides, MSU spokesman Terry Denbow said its members will receive the information it asks for from the university, although he was unsure what process they would have to go through. There is no effort to keep any information from the panel, he said.

“The intention is for them to have any information they want and need,” Denbow said.

But Michael Krueger, a member of Students for Economic Justice, said it’s concerning the group has not met or discussed the issue prior to the first meeting. However, the history senior agreed it’s important for a public meeting to be held before next week’s finals.

“We’re going to go in with an open mind, and hopefully they’re going to be someone we can trust,” he said. “But it’s hard to trust something that McPherson hand-put together himself.”

Group members will get a chance to evaluate the panel - and how much they feel it can be trusted - at a private meeting before the 6:30 p.m. public hearing.

“We want to try to evaluate the panel itself. That’s our objective for the preliminary meeting,” said Stephen Germic, the group’s faculty adviser and an American Thought and Language visiting assistant professor. “There’s a lot of questions we have.”

Those concerns include questions about the panel’s responsibilities, its final report and each member’s background with similar issues.

Germic also said members of Students for Economic Justice will push for the panel to consider the group’s campus campaign for workers’ rights in relation to the issues of the investigation.

“We see them as interrelated,” he said. “We don’t think the group would have been infiltrated if it wasn’t for the work the group does.”

Jeremy W. Steele can be reached at steelej7@msu.edu.