As Pete Wilson neared the end of his June 7 radio show on Vanderbilt University’s WRVU 91.1 FM, he told listeners that the station would be switched over to online automation for a few hours so that an engineer could perform routine maintenance. “Nothing nefarious” was afoot, said Mr. Wilson, a Vanderbilt alumnus. “At least I don’t think so.”
Mr. Wilson had reason to be suspicious. The music-industry Web site CMJ.com had reported a day earlier that WRVU’s call letters were quietly changed on June 1 to WFCL. That suggested that the station had been sold, just as its DJ’s and devotees had been fearing would happen ever since WRVU’s owner, Vanderbilt Student Communications Inc., or VSC, announced in September that it planned to explore the possibility as a way to finance an endowment for student-media ventures.
Confirmation of the $3.35-million deal arrived in the form of a press release issued just minutes after Mr. Wilson had played the last song of his show—Johnny Thunders’s punk ballad “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” The buyer was WPLN 90.3 FM, Nashville’s National Public Radio affiliate, and the switchover happened swiftly. At midnight WRVU—an idea hatched 60 years ago as a student’s pirate station—ceased broadcasting, and WFCL 91 One began piping classical music over the frequency.
The sale has pitted the station’s supporters, many of them alumni and some students, against VSC, a nonprofit board that was created in 1967 to protect free speech during the Vietnam years. Also caught in the crossfire has been the university itself, which is the target of a “Pledge Nothing” campaign led by WRVU supporters who are demanding a five-year moratorium on any sale of the station. The sale of the station has yet to be approved by the Federal Communications Commission.
“Kind of underhanded” was how Robert Ackley, WRVU’s station manager, described the way VSC handled the shutdown. In a video interview with InsideVandy, the Web site of the student newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler. he said, “None of our DJ’s were able to have a last show and say their farewells to their listeners.”
Mark A. Wollaeger, a professor of English and chairman of VSC, said in the same video that while he wished the transfer could have been handled more respectfully, he had to weigh other considerations.
“Angry, frustrated people and open mikes over the airwaves is a volatile, dangerous mixture,” he said. “And so radio stations universally make a switchover of this kind, which seems brutal. But the danger of having people who are just getting news and are angry about it, on the air, broadcasting to the world, is a real one, and it’s unfortunate.”
WRVU will continue to be available, but only on the Web, where it will be run on automation until DJ’s are invited back in the fall—an intentional “waiting period,” Mr. Wollaeger says. At that point, the signal will also be carried on WPLN’s HD3 channel. Many of the station’s DJ’s have complained that their audience—which Arbitron measured at 30,800 unique, weekly listeners in April—will plummet because so few people have HD radios.
Mr. Wollaeger says it is “impossible to say” what will happen to WRVU’s listenership: “I’m hoping, and we’re hoping, that insofar as WRVU is a dedicated niche audience with people who are committed to particular shows that are very popular, that they will be willing to make a small investment, say, of $100, to buy an HD radio ... and still have access to it sitting in their home.”
He says surveys of Vanderbilt students found “a tiny number” of students who listen to that station—or any station—over the air.
The proceeds from WRVU’s sale will be used to finance an endowment to support InsideVandy, the Hustler, WRVU, and the other publications that VSC owns—a necessity for the future, he says, in the wake of declining revenues from print advertising. Mr. Wollaeger has said that the Hustler’s advertising revenue, along with student-activity fees, has been the backbone of VSC’s budget.
Sharon Scott, a Vanderbilt alumna who was general manager of WRVU in the mid-1990s, argues that VSC’s deliberations were opaque and that it had stacked the deck when it voted to sell the radio station. Of the board’s eight voting members, seven were in favor of the sale, and one abstained. All five of the board’s student representatives write for publications that will directly benefit from the resulting endowment—either the Hustler, InsideVandy, or a conservative/libertarian campus magazine called The Torch.
“No one from WRVU was on the board to decide the station’s fate, and we find this appalling,” says Ms. Scott, an organizer of WRVU Friends and Family, a group of former DJ’s and supporters that formed last fall to oppose the sale. “The thing that the students are the most upset about is how they have been completely excluded from this process,” Ms. Scott says.
Mr. Wollaeger counters that the board had read more than 700 e-mailed comments on the proposed sale but that “the great majority” were not “constructive.” He maintains that all student media, including WRVU, will be endangered without the security of an endowment.
WPLN is reportedly planning a capital campaign to pay off the purchase price within 18 months.
