jetfli said:
Nock said:
Please do not believe the Tennessean... this is where the facts are as written by the students who built the station.
While I would never pick the Tennessean in any fight, the truth is actually in the middle when it comes to what both "sides" are stating. As far as what students have to say, remember, most students on campus believe the university experience is about students and student culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. The modern university is all about big business. They're all about selling education and sports, soliciting donors and grants, and in the case of Vanderbilt, selling medical services and research. Yeah, there are students who believe WRVU was about them. Professors saw it as a teaching tool. But the university simply saw it as an outdated tool that should be sold while it still had some worth as a commodity.
I think you've got more sense than anybody who has posted so far, including the ones who want to exclusively blame VSC, or the students, or WPLN. Your views sound cynical, but cynicism usually gets closer to the truth than conspiratorial thinking. From the 1970s onward, college stations were a student activity, with little if any "educational" value to them, regardless of the founders' intentions. More or less, they were the beneficiaries of the serendipitous occurrence of the rise of hard rock music in the hippie/counterculture era, and in some cases, administrations probably conceded them to the activist student groups of the time, since then-new media like public TV made radio passe as an educational medium. (There is, of course, no positive evidence that VU "handed" the station over to students because of this, but in other parts of the country, the student demonstrations for a greater say in campus affairs almost certainly had an effect.)
In other words, nobody foresaw, not even Berryhill, that college radio would become mainly identified with youth culture, back in the 1950s. In fact, I would suggest to all that sentiment and nostalgia has fueled this angst more than any present-day value college radio has, as the baby boom generation mourns the loss of one of "its" products (likewise for subsequent generations, albeit progressively less and less, up until about 1995). That's what so much of this institution-bashing (and what could be more American, in a time like this with failing economic and political structures?) really amounts to, grief.
Even if VSC can be proven wrong about student listenership, VSC's mandate is to serve both the student body and the larger community by providing information. From what I know, WRVU ran no programs, even in timeslots like Sunday mornings, about happenings and activities on campus, or for that matter, about the schools and departments. If the "e-staff" could have been persuaded to perhaps cede some time on the station for VSC to produce a polished, professional discussion/interview program about the University, and even if few if any people listened, VSC might (and I stress "might") have given the station a reprieve. Instead, the staff did what one would expect college kids to do, they obviously went to bat for their friends in programming choices, indulging their often snobbish interests to the exclusion of other considerations such as accessibility of the music, artistic merit, and the like.
Like it or not, elitism is not popular right now, even at high-end schools like VU, and WRVU got itself caught on the wrong side of things culturally. And you can be sure this is going to happen elsewhere: college radio cultures that have been years or decades in the making are not going to change overnight. In this day and time, that's a liability.
