Posted: 03/28/07

Mike, what kind of school are we?

Jake Dubuque | contributing columnist
jdubuque@smcvt.edu

Over the past few weeks everyone has been talking about Mike. The Mike - WWPV 88.7 FM and streaming online here. With all of the usual grace and tact exhibited by public radio, VPR approached the college to see if the institution was interested in replacing the voice of its students with the sounds of yet another classical station. Station DJs along with the rest of the community found out about this from The Echo and began to worry about what was going on.

Hold the music Mike. For a moment the cry on campus was deafening: “you cannot sell such a valuable resource!” Leave it to an economist to point out the obvious – well how much are you offering Mr. Vogelzang? Would it be worth selling the station if the revenue paid for a hockey rink on campus? If that were the case, more than a few people might change their opinion, especially if the rink had underground parking.

If Mr. Vogelzang offered Mr. vanderHeyden a ball-park figure, I can assure you it did not come close to a down-payment on a hockey arena. The timing is too coincidental. A serious offer would have come later this year, after the new president took office. Rather, this was a bargain-hunting expedition by an organization who thought the only way it would be able to purchase the college’s frequency at a price it could afford would be to cut a deal before Mr. vanderHeyden left office. Dealing with the husband of one of VPR’s board of directors members must have seen like an opportunity not to pass up. It is to President vanderHeyden’s credit that he refused the offer.

Interestingly, the offer started a discussion that VPR could not have wanted the college to have. Everyone from the students to the faculty to the administration began talking about not only what WWPV means to the college, but more importantly what it could mean. There was once a time when the journalism department produced an award-winning news broadcast on the radio, but over time students were substituted for BBC broadcasts. The station has the technological capacity to broadcast our sports games live, but only an occasional game is covered. In fact, the technology exists to provide music 24 hours a day, even if no one is present in the station, and yet we broadcast VPR programming from 2 to 10am and again from 4 to 5 pm. Why is it that students are denied the opportunity to host morning shows or be on air between 4 and 5 p.m. — the busiest commute times?

The current contract of sharing the frequency with VPR was billed as ‘providing quality broadcasting during times that no students would want shows.’ Rather than have WWPV broadcast dead air, VPR would generously provide programming. Today that rationale is absurd. In reality, WWPV could purchase the technology to provide constant programming so that the station would never broadcast dead air. In reality, VPR clings to this contract because of its monopoly of the most important hours in radio. Having a discussion about WWPV’s potential should have been the last thing VPR wanted to provoke.

As it turns out, the community supports its student-run radio station. But the question now becomes: if we as a community reject an offer to sell the station, what do we do with it? I think former WWPV DJs like Matthew Engels who went on to work for WBLM in Portland and WIZN here in Vermont, Matt Reno who went to work as a DJ and commercial producer for WIZN, and Andrew Kaiser who now has a prominent role on 95.5 Triple X’s popular morning show would all agree that the college should invest in the station.

Investing in the station begins by tearing up the contract with VPR so that students are no longer limited to when they are able to access the frequency. Investing in the station means re-developing award winning journalism programs for radio. Investing in the station means providing support from the business department: particularly marketing expertise. It also means that when the station manager asks to contact Tom Freston (an alum who was one of the founding members and former CEO of MTV) for financial support for its endeavors, the alumni relations office agrees. After all, if the college is unwilling to allow the station to solicit a donation from one of the godfathers of MTV, does the college really support the station?