At Wesleyan University in the fall of 2004, a proposal by the administration to turn the school’s freeform radio station into an NPR affiliate spurred an angry backlash. The station, WESU, is one of the oldest in the country, and cultivates a fiercely alternative image. Affiliation with NPR, we were told, would mean the corporatization of WESU, another waypoint in the death of independent radio. For weeks, everyone had an opinion about the station. The student general manager of WESU became a campus celebrity. Events culminated with the 66-year-old university president being trapped in a stairwell by dozens of shouting undergrads.
I was a sophomore at Wesleyan that semester, and co-hosted a talk show on the station in the 12:30 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. slot on Sunday nights. The general lack of organization that had precipitated the proposal to bring in NPR meant that we were pretty much left on our own. Only two of us had passed the supposedly mandatory DJ tests, and nobody really knew how to run the board. Still, we took our show seriously. We mapped conversations, pre-recorded comedy bits, brought in articles, and practiced introductions. For four guys who didn’t know how to talk into a microphone, we weren’t half bad.
One week, in preparation for a segment on the struggle over the station’s future, I conducted an interview with two of the most vocal anti-NPR activists. They explained to me the importance of community media, and said that control by some administration-appointed NPR lackey would destroy WESU’s character. Then one made a startling admission. Before the recent outcry, he said, he had hardly been aware of the station.
As it turned out, many of those most active in the movement to save WESU would have had a hard time finding it on the dial just weeks earlier. These students seemed to have been inspired not by any particular love for Wesleyan’s freeform station, but by a general nostalgia for old-fashioned radio. The threat of WESU turning into yet another NPR clone awakened a nascent yearning for the days before Clear Channel, when a local radio station didn’t play the same eight songs as every other station in the country. Radio has become the ultimate symbol of the evils of media consolidation. The fight for WESU was an opportunity to strike back.
The spring of 2008 is an odd time for a college magazine to publish a radio-themed issue. Never has radio felt less relevant. On campus, it seems like everyone has an iPod. At Duke they give them out for free. Computer speakers have replaced the boombox; cell phone alarms the clock radio. New music comes from Pandora.com and Limewire, Howard Stern comes from XM, and public radio comes from NPR.org.
Yet, we believe that it’s too early to write radio’s eulogy. The nostalgia of the anti-NPR activists at Wesleyan misses out on the vibrancy that still exists in non-commercial radio. In this issue, we offer a brief taste. We have Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman on the value of radio as independent media, Rifka Dzodin on how pirate radio shapes Israel’s political and cultural landscape, Top 40 legend Cousin Brucie on the role of the DJ, and a look at college radio’s future from Benjamin Holzman. Plus, podcast reviews, dirty words, and more.
