Here are the dynamics: if we walk out, President Bennet’s only options are to either lose the license to the FCC, (which will revoke it if 88.1FM is unused for a period of one month while school is in session), or bring in a lucrative 24-hour NPR feed to retain its ownership and simply wait out the demonstrations. If and when the administration decides to reopen the station to students, most of them won’t even be aware it was formerly a student station.
We do not have a trump card; the University is not obligated to provide access to everyone who wants a show, and has no desire to forfeit its station license. Furthermore, the fact that no community volunteers will be removed from WESU programming is a direct testament to the gains we have achieved during negotiations.
There are practical realities here. WESU is now owned by a private institution committed to providing an educational resource for students, with the authority to select the people who will serve its educational mission and respect its property and authority. Our desire to utilize the station as an outlet for creative expression is not in jeopardy, but we must discard our baseless sense of entitlement to say and do whatever we want on community airwaves. Your political viewpoints will be safe, but your ability to say the F-word at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning will not.
The issue is not NPR. The issues are corporatism, undue administrative influence, and loss of tradition, identity and programming autonomy. Once we have a GM, paid by the University but selected by the WESU Board of Directors, only then can we fight for further editorial control. At this point in time, a victory against the implementation of NPR still screws the station out of achieving the improvement it desperately needs, and hides the fact that access to the NPR satellite grants us access to programs like BBC News, etc. The Students for Democratic Action assert that “NPR is a paragon of white, male, middle-class, yuppyism in makeup and outlook.” Dude! So is Students for Democratic Action! Please! I am pleading with the student activists not to politicize this issue any further!
Now is the time to refocus our efforts. I refuse to watch our station disintegrate in the face of righteous indignation and the fractional infighting (with outsiders) which is preventing any real progress towards a solution. The ideological campaign against NPR is not synonymous with the campaign to save WESU. Rampant factual inaccuracies, disorganization, contradictory positions, and the fundamentalism of all parties involved have resulted in a very depressing betrayal of the station’s interests and options. The assertion that the Board is “letting Bennet get his foot in the door” is baseless; he’s already in the room. As such, it is now the responsibility of the Board to prevent the forces against community radio from closing it on us forever. We must solidify, and pledge our support to the permanence of community radio in Middletown. I came to Wesleyan for WESU, and I assure you that I will not leave without it.
The fact remains that we have a deadline. In the coming month, a Transition Committee will be formed to restructure the WESU Board, the station’s programming, and the mechanisms for managerial control. The station cannot afford to operate in its current condition of managerial incapacity and constant FCC violations; some sort of structural overhaul must be performed and established by the time the station goes online for the spring semester on Feb. 1st, 2005. The only way to ensure that we are operating responsibly by February 1st is to ensure that a GM is in place at WESU.
I ask that WESU, the students and alumni of Wesleyan University, in addition to the greater Middletown community join together in support of the installation of a General Manager and the implementation of the tenets of Luke Snelling’s proposal “The Future of WESU,” so that the interests of both the community and the University can be accommodated (check the website).
If you are interested in learning more about the many aspects of the process, would like a say in the developments, or simply want to be kept up to date regarding our plans, please e-mail wesu@wesufm.org and visit our official policy and position papers at http://www.wesufm.org/news.html.
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