KTRU’s fm license

Dear President Leebron,

Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed letters responding to concerns over the sale of KTRU’s FM license and transmitter. Your letters provide some insight to the pressures you’ve been under and show the beginnings of what could be a productive dialogue between the students, alumni, the greater Houston public, and the Board of Governors.

I have some criticisms of your justifications for selling, of the tactics you used in the sale, and of your strategy for building Rice’s future as an educational institution devoted to freedoms of inquiry and expression.

In your announcement concerning the sale, you have failed to elucidate the circumstances which led to KTRU having a 50,000 watt transmitter and have misled people when you state that it is oversized and therefore underutilized. You have misused Arbitron ratings as a way to quantify value or demonstrate utility. You do not consider the fact that KTRU is unlikely to receive complimentary promotional recordings from music labels if it loses its unique position in the FM market and therefore either programming costs will increase dramatically or its quality will be compromised. You seek to distract people from the fact that you are reallocating resources from one constituency in a paternalistic attempt to define what the common good is. You have betrayed the trust of your students by working in secret (hiding behind the flatly patronizing excuse of ‘complicated negotiations’) instead of engaging in open debate and working through established channels of governance.

You have the opportunity to correct all of this and demonstrate true leadership.

As many alumni will recall, until about 1992 KTRU operated with a 650 watt transmitter that broke down frequently, leading to phone calls between student managers and engineers and periods of being “off the air.” The offer to upgrade the transmitter did not come from Rice University and it did not come in the form of a 5,000 watt transmitter. It came from KRTS¹ in the form of a 50,000 watt transmitter as required by the FCC because their introduction of a frequency next to 91.7 would have drowned out KTRU’s signal. At the time, the students were concerned that an upgrade might come loaded with conditions that would interfere with the students’ ability to make programming decision and keep operations student-run. While in comparison to “most college radio stations” KTRU’s wattage is large, it does not follow that it is underutilized and therefore should be sold off. The 50,000 wattage size was made necessary by the location of other transmitter-strengths next to our frequency.

Citing Arbitron ratings as a measure of value or utility is problematic on three fronts. First, it was never communicated to the students that achieving measurable Arbitron ratings would be important to the future of the station. Second, Arbitron ratings are based on probabilities with inaccurate methods of sample; they are only used as an estimate by commercial stations to sell advertising time. As a noncommercial, educational station, KTRU would have never paid attention to these ratings, and likewise Arbitron would not have paid attention to KTRU or its audience. Even supposing Arbitron could provide a measure of the public’s listening habits, there are a host of other values that it can not measure, such as: the educational value of the content, the development of a students’ skills in programming and working in a team, the freedom students have to explore and learn about music and the effect that exploration has on the listening public, the networks that are created through student culture, and the democratizing effect of the dissemination of diverse genres of music reflective of our nation’s history and culture (including, but not limited to classical and fine arts programming). Arbitron ratings do not measure the value of teaching students how to produce culture rather than merely consume it.

Taking away the FM license and transmitter would fundamentally disrupt the students’ ability to have a relationship with a local Houston audience. On the FM dial, KTRU is one of several options to Houston radio listeners. The Public Service Announcements, the interviews and live performances of local and touring artists, caller requests are all attuned to a local public. Yes, the internet has expanded the reach of KTRU, but it can not substitute for the FM signal. As an internet-only broadcaster KTRU would be one of thousands of options and available only to those with constant access to a computer. New music producers with limited budgets would be unlikely to supply KTRU with access to their music for free because KTRU would lack a unique position the market. Furthermore, Rice University would be the only nationally ranked university to have lost its FM license and transmitter.²

The reason for secrecy was to prevent dissent that would have prevented a sale from even being considered. KTRU is not a publicly traded company with stocks that could rise or fall based upon rumors of a merger or acquisition, so there is no commercial reason to have negotiated the deal in secrecy. If you continue in this manner, you risk encountering formal Petition to Deny the transfer of the license at the FCC (along with many informal objections), questions about your capability to govern a university effectively, and future scrutiny over sentences like “Going forward, students and others are entitled to hold us to our word that this is not a precedent.” However well-intentioned a statement like that may be, it does not redress the damage you’ve caused by acting secretly and disingenuously in connection with KTRU.

This sale should be viewed as an attempt to steal the FM license from the students. It was started as an independent station by the students, has always been paid for with undergraduate student blanket taxes, and has thrived because of its student volunteers. Going forward, the university should provide documentation delineating that it holds the license in trust for the students at KTRU. The only reason William Marsh Rice University is listed as the holder of the FCC license is because of student turnover and the fact that students should not be expected to handle all of the legal technicalities of holding an FM license. A new servery does not make up for this theft and it is a distraction. The university can finance a construction project and provide scholarships while valuing student culture in all of its forms.

Please cancel this sale and meet with the KTRU-Friendly Committee of the Faculty Senate. You should use this channel of communication if you want to discuss Arbitron ratings; paid internships for students to broadcast campus news, concerts or lectures; or increase classical music and news in the content of KTRU’s programming. I’m sure they would be open to your ideas and it would be a less risky allocation of resources for the public.

Sincerely yours,

Heidi Bullinga
Hanszen College
Bachelor of Arts 1993, Bachelor of Architecture 1995
KTRU General Manager 1992-1993

1.) KRTS was set up as a new commercial radio station at 92.1 by a member of a family that is a major benefactor to Rice University. This station was subsequently sold for $72.5 million in 2004.

2.) U.S. News and World Report’s nationally ranked universities and the FM call letters of their radio stations

Harvard University    WHRB
Princeton University    WPRB
Yale University    WYBC
Columbia University    WKCR
Stanford University    KZSU
University of Pennsylvania    WQHS
California Institute of Technology    W6UE
Massachusetts Institute of Technology    WMBR
Dartmouth College    WDCR
Duke University    WXDU
University of Chicago    WHPK
Northwestern University    WNUR
Johns Hopkins University    WJHU
Washington University in St. Louis    KWUR
Brown University    WELH
Cornell University    WVBR
Rice University    KTRU –for sale?!
Vanderbilt University     WRVU
University of Notre Dame    WVFI
Emory University    WMRE
Georgetown University    WGTB
University of California – Berkeley    KALX
Carnegie Mellon University    WRCT
University of Southern California    KSCR
University of California – Los Angeles    UCLARadio.com “UCLA’s student radio station was never officially licensed as an AM or FM station due to lack of support from university administration. Due to the difficulty of purchasing a band in Los Angeles’ overcrowded frequency spectrum, the station is not currently considering purchasing one.” -wikipedia