A Tribute To College Radio, Or Bela Lugosi Lives

The drive between where I live and where I was going is long and boring, and on that Saturday morning, I was idly poking around the radio dial looking for something different when I landed on honest-to-goodness college radio. It was the University of Miami's WVUM, popping up through the interference in Broward County, playing unfamiliar indie rock and decidedly un-slick promos and sweepers, probably on automation -- I didn't hear any live chatter, just music and promos. I'd heard WVUM many times before moving here; my wife was, once upon a time, the station's General Manager, and I used to joke that every time I heard the station, they'd be playing "Bela Lugosi's Dead." I swear, I'd hear it every time, for decades.

But this time, WVUM was Bauhaus-free, and I stuck around, listening all the way to Coconut Grove, then again on the way home until the signal finally gave way to a pile of interference. It had been years since I'd listened to a college radio station that wasn't operated as a slick, professional public radio station; it's hard to find a student-run school station in a lot of markets, and colleges have been selling their FM signals to religious station operators for a while now, citing decreased student interest while coveting the cash they can get -- once -- for their license. Running a station is expensive and complicated. Why bother?

For one thing, doing college radio is valuable in ways beyond vocational. It's like any other organized club activity in college, whether it's the volleyball team or the drama club. You get to do things that are fun and interesting and not the same as you do in class, you learn some skills that might come in handy (for radio, it's obviously communication), and you bond with people you might not have met otherwise. And maybe you end up going into that field; there are a lot of WVUM alumni in the media today.

There aren't a lot of alumni from my own college radio station in the business, but there are a few out there. My station, WHRC at Haverford College, was a carrier-current AM that you couldn't get outside a couple of buildings, and I wasn't even sure of that. You COULD get it in the cafeteria, where one of two dining rooms had the station piped in on the P.A. If it wasn't meal time, nobody was listening. It didn't matter. Doing radio was fun, listeners or no. Playing music we liked, talking about whatever nonsense came to mind, hanging out in the studio in the basement of the Dining Center... I can't remember most of the classes I took, but I remember WHRC, and even had I not gone into radio, that experience would have been worth every moment.

Colleges don't care about that these days, not enough, anyway. As for whether the students care in an age when they can do their own podcasts and radio may seem like an anachronism to them, all I know is that after years of dormancy and intermittent attempts to resurrect the station in different podcasting and streaming forms, WHRC has been revived as a stream with a decent schedule. WVUM still seems to have support. We assume that nobody under 30 would care about doing a radio show, but maybe that's a false assumption. Maybe commercial radio, tightly programmed and full of content that turns them off, is what they're not interested in. And maybe radio -- looser, and you can play music -- is more appealing than getting lost in a mass of podcasts.

Would more student radio mean more talent to be harvested by commercial radio? Maybe, maybe not. Honestly, when I was IN college radio, I didn't think of it as a gateway to a career, and I don't think any of my colleagues did, either. We were just having fun and being creative. There are worse things on which colleges can spend money these days.

It might be too late to repopulate the left side of the FM dial with student stations, and forget about AM, but whether it's by streaming or an HD2 channel or an LPFM, I hope students of the future get a chance to play music and talk and have fun doing radio. May there always be a place for a Miami student to play "Bela Lugosi's Dead." Again.

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Programming note: We're off Monday (May 29th) for Memorial Day in the U.S. Have a safe weekend and we'll reconvene next week.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
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Twitter @pmsimon
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