Re: Boston U, WBUR, and John Silber

[Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 02:04 PM 6/14/2003, Sid Whitaker wrote:
>Because longtime BU president (now chancellor) John Silber would never
>dream of giving students access to a high-power urban FM signal. After
>Silber became prez in '71, he took WBUR away from student control (he
>also shutdown the student newspaper and turned it into a mouthpiece for
>the administration) leaving students interested in radio with only WTBU,
>the carrier-current AM. (BTW, print journalism students launched their
>own newspaper (The Daily Free Press), which still publishes. In Silber's
>view, BU students were too radical, dangerous, and they couldn't be
>trusted to operate their own radio station. As older readers will
>readily recall, the early 70s were rough times on college campuses, and
>BU was no exception. In the early 70s students protesting Vietnam  (and
>the administration's academic and residential policies) frequently
>occupied administrative offices, walked out of exams, and managed to
>cancel one commencement. I think Silber feared students turning WBUR
>into a weapon against the administration in those days.


Ah, Sid - I didn't know we overlapped!  I was at BU from 1994-98, and I 
entirely concur with his arguments.  A while back I went into the library 
and dug up every BU yearbook since WTBU was started in 1960.  A summary of 
the history is here:
http://www.friedbagels.com/wtbuhistory.html

There's an additional angle here...Silber worked to take away student 
control of the station for the reasons Sid outlined, and the rumor has it 
that around 1990 or so, he gave an ultimatum to Jane Christo (who'd be at 
the station for several years by then) that WBUR's funding from BU was 
going to be cut off in two or three years.   At that point, Jane eliminated 
the few remaining student positions (except for the go-fers work-study 
kids) and aggressively eliminated the remaining music shows to replace them 
with NPR news.   Fortune smiled on the timing...the First Gulf War happened 
and WBUR was just started to air some BBC World Service programming.  With 
the war...BBC became top priority on the schedule and WBUR's listenership 
skyrocketed.

The good news is that with WBUR's move to new facilities in 1995, WTBU 
moved into WBUR's old space in 1996 and therefore had vastly superior 
facilities over the old Myles Standish Annex dorm basement studios (which 
flooded right before they moved out, same time the Green Line tunnel 
did...October of 1996 I think).    The additional of the webcast made a 
huge jump over the carrier-current AM/leaky-cable FM system.

It's still a very discouraging place to volunteer...very few people listen, 
even with the webcast...but it's a lot better than it was.  And they 
routinely turn volunteers away each semester...I was at the last Open 
Meeting at the beginning of the spring 2003 semester and the entire staff 
was there, plus all the newcomers who're interested in it, and there were 
easily 200-250 people there.  It was nuts.

As for WBUR, I was told that no students had been on the air for nearly a 
decade when I started there (as a work-study in 1996).  But there were a 
handful of us...never more than two or three...who worked as board-ops 
(myself included).  A handful more who are assistant producers on the shows 
and/or newswriters in the newsroom.   If you take the initiative, you can 
learn a lot.  I'm sure I was a good-ole pain in Mike LeClair's (Chief 
Engineer) ass, but damn I owe a lot to that man for what he taught me.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron "Bishop" Read             aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels Consulting          AOL-IM: readaaron
http://www.friedbagels.com      Boston, MA