RBR+TVBR‘s recent coverage of FM station sales by Dartmouth College and Purdue University led retired Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth Member Peter Tannenwald to write a Letter to the Editor addressing a reference of the August 2017 decision by the entity that controlled the former WBRU-FM in Providence to sell the Alternative station.
As he explains, the vote to sell WBRU came from the students that maintained oversight of the station — not a university board of directors.
By Peter Tannenwald
Retired Member, Fletcher Heald & Hildreth
Last week’s story about the decision by Purdue University to sell WBAA reminded me of your recent story about Dartmouth’s decision to sell its student-operated WFRD-FM, which in turn suggested that the decision in 2017 to sell WBRU at Brown University was regrettable.
I was not involved in the Purdue or Dartmouth decisions, but I did participate in the decision at Brown, where as a student, I managed WBRU-FM’s predecessor carrier current campus AM station some six decades ago and had a ball spinning 45’s at live remotes from fraternity parties. I later served as FCC legal counsel and a Board member for over 50 years.
Unlike most other college stations, WBRU’s FM station was never owned or controlled by Brown University, so Brown did not and could not make the decision to sell the FM license. At the University’s insistence, the students formed a separate corporation, Brown Broadcasting Service, Inc., to acquire and operate the station and to hold the FCC license. The corporation has no stock or “owners,” but rather has two classes of “members” – the Board of Directors, who are mostly alumni plus the student General Manager, and the student volunteer staff. The University holds no Board seats. The station leased (and
still leases) studio and office space from the University for cash rent.
Both member classes had to approve the sale separately. After lengthy debate, both voted in favor. In other words, the students had veto power but voted to sell the FM frequency. The University administration actually took a dim view of the decision, but it was not theirs to make. Only the FM frequency and transmission plant were sold; studio and production facilities were retained.
It’s a long story, but what was formerly WBRU-FM/95.5 is now a funded multimedia workshop, with professional equipment, providing two online audio streams, a YouTube channel, student-produced podcasts, and some programming offered for broadcast on a local LPFM frequency. This was the direction that the students chose for their future. WBRU-FM had a commercial FCC license and had to support itself with advertising revenue. While learning about advertising was part of the educational experience, the students decided to free themselves from having to eke out dollars in a marketplace with increasingly consolidated ownership of broadcast station and ad agencies, where airtime is rarely bought locally by people that sales staff can visit in person, and group station owners offer advertisers better deals if they get the entire market buy, leaving nothing for buys on independent stations. The activities are now fully student managed and operated, without the professional staff assistance formerly needed. The students have the benefit of advice from the alumni Directors, chosen to provide a variety of relevant professional expertise, when they ask for it.
If you had faced today’s environment when you were a student, how would you have voted? You would not have been allowed to play fast and loose with on-air content anymore, thanks to the FCC’s increasingly active Enforcement Bureau and ever-expanding web of regulatory requirements. You would have had to choose your content with a view toward maximizing Nielsen ratings, not what you liked or wanted to put on the air. And you would have ended up as a 20-year-old trying to program for a listener demographic twice your age.
I personally was very sad to see the FM frequency go, and I miss what it represented in its heyday. But what you or I think is not the point. The activity exists for the benefit of today’s students, not nostalgic alumni. The only significant constraint on student freedom at WBRU today is a requirement to preserve a healthy activity for future generations. WBRU’s students in 2017 voted to escape from the chains imposed by an increasingly concentrated and regulated broadcast industry and to set themselves free to create any kind of content in any medium they choose and to focus on media where they prefer to access to content. They also gained more flexibility to learn by trial and error, a very important component of the university experience.
Your reporting and the stock market make it clear that radio broadcasting is far from dead and may soon enjoy a resurgence thanks to upcoming new technologies. But in light of how both the business environment and the attitudes of student volunteers have evolved in the 21st century, at least in Providence, Rhode Island, traditional commercial radio was no longer the best environment for the intensive learning experience that has always been the fundamental reason for WBRU’s existence. It was the students, not the University or alumni, who said so.
Although as a radio aficionado, I am unhappy about the number of colleges and universities that have decided to sell their radio stations during the past few years, I think that each situation has to be evaluated based on its own circumstances.
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