pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Do tell! We endured grueling college radio turmoil last fall.

ugh, it's a very long story. but it does involve a lot of au courant political stuff.

http://dailycollegian.com/2015/09/29/wmua-community-members-look-to-administration-against-student-leadership/

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/09/volunteers_at_troubled_wmua_as.html

http://www.gazettenet.com/news/townbytown/amherst/18746942-95/umass-amherst-chancellor-responds-to-petition-delivered-by-community-members-of-wmua-radio-station

(it's a student -vs- community volunteer battle. in the latest salvo, on the new fall schedule all the most vocal critics of the students - it's a student-run station - had their shows moved to 4 a.m.)

Just clicked the first link and came back to say that Kumble Subbaswamy is an awesome name.

i went to college in the late 90s and the shit that went down (and was quickly forgotten) would probably fuel a million twitter wars today.

i mean at the radio station in particular

why was Shea fired? sexual harassment?

i went to college in the late 90s and the shit that went down (and was quickly forgotten) would probably fuel a million twitter wars today.

ditto

the students claimed.....a lot of stuff. none of which has gone anywhere. the consensus among community members is that they just didn't like having him around. so they got rid of him. and they got rid of the student advisor who had been there for decades. it will end in lawsuits. the students REALLY want the station to be a CMJ-style indie rock station. and the WMUA charter is not about that at all. it's been a completely free-form non-commercial station forever. to be reductive, the kids don't want to deal with the olds at all.

x-post

the community/student thing was a little fraught at my school, too, and as programming director (for two years anyway) i tried my best to mediate.

on the one hand, the students were--with some exceptions--about as callow and immature as you'd expect 20-year-olds to be, and some of them definitely shouldn't have been entrusted w/ leadership of an institution like a radio station.

some of the community DJs had been around for decades and in many ways they were the carriers of the institutional memory. some of them; others really just came in, did their show, and left without so much as saying "hi." at times i was inclined to challenge the sense of entitlement some of the long-time community DJs seemed to have developed. on the other hand i respect that they had loyal audiences who didn't want the shows to be moved around.

the big shitshow was when i didn't include college football games as part of our programming schedule because the athletic department didn't bother to actually fill out the form to apply.

i think it's really important to have a university employee--someone who's been around for a while--as a kind of bridge between students and longtime community DJs. you need someone from the university community who knows the station and can carry that institutional memory, since students by definition are around for a few years (at most) and then leave. even basic things like knowing when/how to fill out our FCC license-renewal application were made difficult because nobody had done it before.

what is this thread about again?

the students claimed.....a lot of stuff. none of which has gone anywhere. the consensus among community members is that they just didn't like having him around. so they got rid of him. and they got rid of the student advisor who had been there for decades. it will end in lawsuits. the students REALLY want the station to be a CMJ-style indie rock station. and the WMUA charter is not about that at all.

we've been dealing with this for years. We employ student volunteers and paid student directors who pay nominal attention to the thousands of other students who pay fees towards the station. Whenever we reminded them of obligations, they accused us of trying to get'em to sell out. "Selling out" in this case is...playing their music at museum and ratskellar events? idk

I use the "guys, I'm a freelance music critic" card as much as I can

(i think my position was made easier by the fact that i was never all that into indie rock, and i was sympathetic to the diversity that the community DJs brought to the mix... reggae, gospel, oldies, folk, etc. stuff most of the students didn't bother with.)

college station deejays are a reaaaaallly insular bunch. Unlike our newspaper students, the deejays actively want to withdraw from campus life and anything related to college. Hence why we had so many deejays who stayed at the station years after graduating (or never graduating). We changed our bylaws last year and it's helped clear much of the bad air.

our campus newspaper made a huge deal about being independent of the university and university funding but I wouldn't say they actively wanted to withdraw

just to bring this discussion (almost) full circle

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wesleyan-newspaper-black-lives-matter_5602f1efe4b0fde8b0d0f40d

there's some seriously illiberal campus-activism BS that can be easily critiqued from any political position btw

We thought about going indie for a while but this is a commuter university in a major urban environment; we never had the ad rate necessary to do it. Now lots of colleagues around the country who helped make their papers independent are in serious trouble.

the biggest shows on WMUA are the weekend polka shows. and they are consistently the biggest money-makers when it comes to donations. by, like, a BIG margin. tens of thousands of dollars a year that goes to the station. and these students have alienated them too. and they are the nicest people you will ever meet. they have a world-wide audience. they don't need this kinda stuff. they are total pros.

ha, Maria was all about that Wesleyan story. that's her alma mater.

...and mine :)

she went to school with the guy who did Mad Men. though i don't think they knew each other well. and johnny temple from girls -vs- boys. i will just never get over the fact that alvin lucier was her music teacher. hipster cred for days!

matthew weiner is a wesleyan alum?

hey alvin lucier... and anthony braxton.

Really cool stories way more informative than anything I've seen on pitchfork in a long time.

Honestly was more like "kids still do that?" than "kids today!" about this college radio stuff. I thought they'd all be podcasting their vines, not squabbling with the olds over what's on ye olde dial

Still feel frazzled thinkin bout four hour meetings at the ol alma mater

at the end of the afternoon when your work day should be ending and they're getting out of bed

ha i still mostly keep college-student hours, i just work a lot more

Discovered recently some bullshit in-studio fight with communication dept profs I barely remembered from my time 15 years ago has been chronicled like The Shot Heard Around The World on Wikipedia, with new students played recordings of the affair so they can realize their debt. College radio is mental.

that's a bummer -- i liked having the olds at my college radio station ... so many of them definitely had better shows than anything the kids were doing. i'm sure there was a little tension there, but i can't remember any real conflicts.

Ime a knowing, wise community elder can often be a naive, self-righteous student who stuck around town.

yep

and ceases to be knowing and wise when you threaten to give his show of 13 years to a freshman

Community radio is a good thing and student radio is a good thing but I dunno if they should be the same thing

Obv people will take what they can get from both sides, just saying in an ideal sitch

seriously, the best polka shows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOnuSLmm_vU

Yeah but even in 2015 an FCC license can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (at the very least). It's not something random community members can just band together to buy, hence college radio stations with community involvement.

xp @da croupier

It's precisely the specialness -- the reality even -- of an FCC license that students don't wanna accept, which I get. I was a college deejay too, just wanted to play my post punk classics for a couple hours and no one fuck with me.

i mean, what was cool for me about community DJs (at least partly) was that they were *from the community*. it was good to get a different perspective from the bubble that was a liberal arts college in the hudson valley.

I'm just wishing that more conversations on the Internet regarding either Pitchfork or SJWs would result in videos being posted about polka.

"i mean, what was cool for me about community DJs (at least partly) was that they were *from the community*. it was good to get a different perspective from the bubble that was a liberal arts college in the hudson valley."

this is the problem with the kids who run the station at Umass now. they really don't want to have anything to do with the community. and they really seem intolerant of different opinions/viewpoints. and older strange radio people. they just want to play their spotify playlists on the air and ignore the outside world. i dunno, they're young. they get paid too. the management people who are students. looks good on a resume.

reassuring to know this is a national epidemic. Repeal the Bill of Rights.

It's precisely the specialness -- the reality even -- of an FCC license that students don't wanna accept, which I get. I was a college deejay too, just wanted to play my post punk classics for a couple hours and no one fuck with me.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 1, 2015 4:51 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't even know what college radio means to students in an era of hyperabundant soundcloud mixes, itunes whatevers, etc. etc. i was in college at the very cusp of all that, when even setting up an internet stream for our station was incredibly cumbersome, and wouldn't work on half of our laptops.... nowadays i imagine that radio might seem a bit antiquated, like public-access TV...

i have to say that the worst thing about the college station here (which is neither great nor terrible on the whole) is that the kids come in and plug in their ipods or ipros or iclouds or whatever and play these lossy, fucked-up-sounding MP3s over the radio and they sound just awful. i'm tempted to write a letter to the station manager but then i will have officialy become Annoying Old Guy Audiophile.

also i once subbed for a guy on the station and every single one of their turntables and CD players was fucked up and barely worked and i was really tempted to just throw my hands up and walk off leaving a bunch of dead air.

that's normal!

our soundboard is from the Reagan administration and held together with tape and paper clips.

yeah but imagine you bring a few boxes of stuff to play on the air and then none of the turntables or CD players work and the on-duty manager is like "oh yeah, they haven't worked this week, sorry." my point is that 99% of the student DJs just plug in their digital hoohas and hit "shuffle."

/old man