Students don't own or hold the keys to anything belonging to a university. They can't "hand over" any keys or anything else. And at this station, most of the contributors were not even students, just volunteers.
They have no real or even philosophical rights at all.
In 1988, I took a business law class at Arizona State University (ASU). One of the topics in that class was the traditional U.S. view of property rights vs. the traditional Mexican view. The professor used hydraulic mining as an example, but I think the contradictory responses by @davideduardo and @fybush on this topic explains the differences in viewpoint very well.
@davideduardo is, according to my memory of what the professor said, taking the traditional U.S. view. The students didn't actually own the license; the university did. And the university can do whatever it wants with that license. It can have a faculty adviser oversee the radio operation (which it apparently did at one time and which was done at my old alma motta, Loyola Marymount University). It could apply to have the station get CPB funds and become a public radio station (before the reciscion happened, anyway). It could retain the license but hire an outside network to run the station. And it could chase the students out without any notice or a chance to have prerecorded goodbyes. The university has the license, it can do anything it wants to with it, and the students, and even more so, community members have absolutely no say. That is the traditional U.S. view of property ownership.
@fybush, on the other hand, argues that the university does have a responsibility to the student and community operators to let them know well beforehand so that any change can be done in an orderly and responsible fashion. This is what my ASU professor called the Mexican view of property rights; that is, the people who are affected by the property owner's decisions have a say in how and what decisions are made precisely because they are directly affected by those decisions.
Though I have been a U.S. citizen all of my life (my background is Irish [mom's side] and English [dad's side]), I find myself more in agreement with the traditional Mexican view of property rights as argued by @fybush here. The U.S. view, while personally and emotionally satisfying, seems to me to be very selfish, self-centered, and shortsighted. Since the students had been running WCSB-FM for, as @fybush put it, "decades", they should have had a say in WCSB's future, though they didn't own the station's license.
They have no real or even philosophical rights at all.
In 1988, I took a business law class at Arizona State University (ASU). One of the topics in that class was the traditional U.S. view of property rights vs. the traditional Mexican view. The professor used hydraulic mining as an example, but I think the contradictory responses by @davideduardo and @fybush on this topic explains the differences in viewpoint very well.
@davideduardo is, according to my memory of what the professor said, taking the traditional U.S. view. The students didn't actually own the license; the university did. And the university can do whatever it wants with that license. It can have a faculty adviser oversee the radio operation (which it apparently did at one time and which was done at my old alma motta, Loyola Marymount University). It could apply to have the station get CPB funds and become a public radio station (before the reciscion happened, anyway). It could retain the license but hire an outside network to run the station. And it could chase the students out without any notice or a chance to have prerecorded goodbyes. The university has the license, it can do anything it wants to with it, and the students, and even more so, community members have absolutely no say. That is the traditional U.S. view of property ownership.
@fybush, on the other hand, argues that the university does have a responsibility to the student and community operators to let them know well beforehand so that any change can be done in an orderly and responsible fashion. This is what my ASU professor called the Mexican view of property rights; that is, the people who are affected by the property owner's decisions have a say in how and what decisions are made precisely because they are directly affected by those decisions.
Though I have been a U.S. citizen all of my life (my background is Irish [mom's side] and English [dad's side]), I find myself more in agreement with the traditional Mexican view of property rights as argued by @fybush here. The U.S. view, while personally and emotionally satisfying, seems to me to be very selfish, self-centered, and shortsighted. Since the students had been running WCSB-FM for, as @fybush put it, "decades", they should have had a say in WCSB's future, though they didn't own the station's license.
