If nobody cared, then the sales of KUSF and KTRU would go unnoticed. Instead, there was community outcry.
The key word there is
community. I wouldn't go so far as to say that a college does not care what the local community thinks, but generally speaking they care a lot less what the
community thinks than what their
students think. Or perhaps more cynically, they care more what their
donating alumni and
paying parents of current students think.
This is not meant to be nasty; it's simple reality. While town-gown relations are important, it is not the town that is paying tuition or donating to the endowment. Well, not for most private schools, anyways. Public schools are something of a different story, especially community colleges, but for private schools - it's the students paying the bills and that's why they're more important.
At both KTRU and KUSF, while there certainly was negative student reaction in both cases...it's also true that in both cases the bulk of the outcry was coming from the local community - the group the college is least likely to give any weight to their claims. Contrast this to WUML at UMass Lowell, where there was community outcry but it was mostly the students themselves that were doing the screaming when UML tried to LMA part of the station off to the Lowell Sun newspaper. And again, UMass Lowell is a public school so what the local community thinks tends to matter more since there's a taxpayer/political dimension in play. (note: this does not mean I endorse WUML's handling of that debacle.)
To say not enough people listen to college radio for this to matter is simply false.
There's an important distinction here: to define "college radio" as "a station owned by a college" is common but virtually worthless. What most people think of as "college radio" is really a programming format that's driven by an operational style that happens to be common when the staff has a high concentration of typical undergraduate students. But it's a
format and that's what matters; many of the "college radio" stations you list as being successful (in terms of ratings and revenue) do not have a "college radio" format. Instead they have a more "professional" format, in WERS's case it's a Triple-A station not unlike WXPN in Philadelphia, which is owned by a college (University of Pennsylvania) but operated wholly professionally as an NPR affiliate and source of Triple-A programming for a lot of the NPR network.
WERS is also different because, unlike many "college radio" stations, it is tightly integrated into a communications curriculum at the college. Much like WMLN at Curry College, which also has more of a Top40 format and is a big part of their curriculum. Stations like that are in little danger of being sold unless the parent college decides to eliminate the entire department, professors and all. (possible, but unlikely)
Of course, being formatted as something other than "college radio" is not a guarantee against a sale. WNAZ at Trivecca Nazarene was formatted as a Christian Rock station (one of the very few student-operation stations like that) and was sold anyways.
My theory is that the only true defense against a sale are to either be part of a communications curriculum (which if you're not already, you're VERY unlikely to become so anytime soon) or to become fiscally self-sustaining. The latter is a simple goal with potentially drastic and wide-reaching consequences. Consequences that often run directly counter to the ego-stroking nature of "college radio". I don't dismiss that lightly; if you're a college station, you NEED that ego-stroking to have any hope of attracting and retaining students to be part of your station. It's not an easy balance to strike.
