Dear President Bennet:
As a member of the Class of 1980, and as former member of the board of directors of WESU-FM, I want to express my disappointment at the idea of the station losing its unique free form programming and becoming yet one more NPR outlet.
I adore NPR, and listen to it daily. I cannot praise it highly enough, and there is no question Middletown would be well served by an NPR station.
I do not know, but can only presume, that there is NPR service in midstate Connecticut, though, from stations broadcasting from Hartford or New Haven.
Even if this is not the case, however, I think it worth praising what WESU brings to its listeners.
WESU reflects the wide and diverse demographic of Wesleyan’s students and the Connecticut Valley listeners. When I was a student there, we played so many different kinds of music, classical, jazz, world music, bluegrass, even polka. Our “Music for the People” show—as it was known then—provided the most important bridge between the campus and the people of color living in Middletown.
More importantly, free form radio enables students to use the radio as a form of the imagination. Wesleyan is not a school training students for a career in radio, public or private; Wesleyan is a liberal arts college training students to think for themselves in new and imaginative ways. I think these students, and their listeners, are much better served by the opportunity to express themselves through the medium of radio—in all its many varieties—than by teaching them to conform to one more NPR cookie cutter station.
I, for one, found my own voice at WESU in the late 1970s. If my show was less than NPR perfect, it did, on the other hand, give me an opportunity to use my imagination and heart. I would not have had this opportunit—or, indeed, have become the person I am today, if my radio experience had been limited to playing the feed for “Car Talk” or the Metropolitan Opera.
Let’s face it: WESU is a strange, unique station, with lots of loose ends, a place of occasional anarchy, and yet, a place of imagination, of creativity, and love. I think the same could be said of Wesleyan itself. I’d encourage the college to treat WESU, in its current wild, unfettered fashion, as a precious jewel. You can hear NPR from coast to coast as you drive the country. But even now, when I head through Connecticut, I always tune to WESU, to find out what my university is up to now.
With best wishes,
Jenny Boylan
Professor of English
Colby College
PS: It’s probably worth mentioning that the first time I read the weather report, on someone else’s show on WESU (this would be fall of 1976), I was so nervous my hands shook. Now, 25 years later, I have been on the Oprah Winfrey Show (twice), the Today Show, and about a dozen other television and three dozen radio programs, including NPR’s Marketplace, the Dianne Rehm Show, and Maine Public Radio. That weather report, which an NPR format at WESU would probably not have allowed me to perform, was the beginning of learning not to be afraid, the beginning of becoming myself.
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