The History of College Radio

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. 

When Guillermo Marconi sent radio signals over a mile away from his father's home in Italy in 1895, the signals weren't the latest rock music, but rather the dots and dashes of Morse code. By December of 1901, Marconi managed to send a radio signal -- again in Morse code -- 1700 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. On Christmas Eve, 1906, Canadian Reginald Fessenden transmitted voice signals in a Christmas concert from 400 foot towers in Massachusetts, to the United Fruit Company ships in the Atlantic Ocean, finishing the transmission by wishing them a Merry Christmas. By 1927, the proliferation of poorly regulated radio stations in the United States led Congress to pass the Radio Act of 1927, which was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on February 23, 1927. The act created a Federal Radio Commission that would grant licenses to stations that could show themselves to be, "in the public interest, convenience, or necessity." In 1934, with the majority of American households now owning a radio receiver, Congress acted again, passing the Communications Act of 1934, signed into law on June 19 of that year by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Act replaced the Federal Radio Commission with the Federal Communications Commission, FCC. The FCC established the first FM broadcasting band as of January 1, 1941. When FM didn't grow as quickly as anticipated, in part because of World War II, the FCC introduced Class D non commercial education licenses in 1948, that colleges and high schools could use for their low-watt stations. Of course, college radio stations pre-existed the Class D licenses. As early as 1912, St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia had an experimental radio license. WRUC at Union College in Schenectady, New York, claims to have been the first commercial college radio station in the country, dating its AM broadcast back to October 14, 1920, although several other campus radio stations dispute their claim of being first. Curry College in Massachusetts, offered a radio broadcasting major starting in November of 1932. Prior to FM radio broadcasting, many campus radio stations employed carrier current transmission, also called wired wireless, which sends radio frequency signals through electrical wiring, which is especially convenient when the majority of listeners live in dormitories on campus. By 1967, 326 FM radio signals in the United States, operated as educational radio, 220 of which were owned and operated by colleges and universities. The type of programming that these stations offered varied widely, from lectures and sporting events, to various kinds of musical shows. Toward the late 1970s, though, a musical genre known as college music or college rock appeared on the scene. American DJ Casey Kasem began his weekly "American Top 40" radio show during Independence Day weekend in 1970, and spent 18 years counting down and playing the top 40 songs from the Billboard Magazine Hot 100 singles chart. As commercial radio stations played tightly controlled rotations of top 40 hits by major labels, many college DJs sought an alternative, playing more obscure music, or focusing on discovering newer artists. 

One band that got a boost from college radio was U2. Before U2 began selling out stadiums, they were four teenagers who stopped by WMBR at MIT for a visit in 1980, and who appeared on KFJC at San Jose State University in 1981, in support of their first album, "Boy." U2's singles, "I Will Follow" and "Gloria" were hits on college radio. Ironically, U2 lead singer Bono later told Fordham University students, "I joined a rock and roll band so I could get out of going to college." The band whose success is perhaps most closely associated with college radio, is REM. REM formed in college town, Athens, Georgia, early in 1980, around the same time that the University of Georgia's WUOG increased its wattage, and leaned into its connections to the local underground music scene. WUOG wasn't the only college station to play REM. The band visited college stations like UNC's WXYC, on their first regional tour, and then continued to visit college radio stations throughout the country. After REM signed with Warner Brothers Records in 1988, some college radio stations stopped playing them, viewing them as too popular and mainstream, with one WUOG DJ saying, "REM is beyond college radio." Although major record labels knew that plays on college radio, often were not going to translate to huge record sales, they did pay attention to it, recognizing by the late 1980s the role of college radio in discovering bands that could later make it in the mainstream. Not all college radio stations turned toward alternative rock though. On November 7, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which issued the congressional corporate charter for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. National Public Radio, NPR, funded in part by the CPB, was incorporated on February 26, 1970, and began broadcasting in April of 1971. Many college stations chose to become NPR member stations, playing NPR content for at least part of the day, in an effort to have a more consistent professional sound representing the college or university. Despite the waning prevalence of radio in the age of streaming audio, as of 2023, somewhere close to 400 college radio stations still broadcast on FM in the United States, with a couple dozen more operating only over the internet. 

Joining me to discuss college radio is Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell, a professor at Fitchburg State University and author of, "Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio."

Speaker 1  9:52  
[Musical interlude]

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:36  
Hi Kate, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  10:39  
Thank you so much for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:40  
Yes, this was a really fun read. So I'm excited to dig in and talk to you a little bit about it. And of course, covering the time that I was in college, when we're looking at college is always an exciting, you know, sort of bit of nostalgia for me, as I'm sure it was for you writing it. So I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about sort of how you got started on this book, why you wrote it. It's your second book. So you know, why, why this topic? And how did you kind of get started on it?

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  11:07  
Yeah, so I started this book, because my alma mater station, WRVU at Vanderbilt University, was one of a series of station sales that happened around 2011. That was very prominent, there was a New York Times article about it. And there was this overwhelming sense that college radio was on the decline along with broadcast media, in general. And in the process of losing that station, I started asking questions about, well, you know, where did this thing come from, that we were so attached to, and how was it that Vanderbilt University or any university, let college students on the airwaves to create these really, sort of all over the place stations where, you know, they're very eclectic in nature? No one station looks like another station, even though they have very similar programming practices, a lot of times around block programming, or freeform programming, or bringing community members in. It's a very kind of bottom up process. How did how did that even happen? Where did that come from? And as I started looking around, just to sort of make sense of what was going on at Vanderbilt, I realized that there wasn't any national history of college radio. And luckily, this tied into my area as a historian, which is political history, first and foremost. And college radio is a political phenomenon. It's created by the federal government through FCC regulations, through the shaping of the idea of educational radio. And then it's also the product of the politics of institutions, in this case, institutions of higher education, that were trying to execute certain political and social projects through radio, creating connections between we call them "town and gown" between the university and a larger community, and radio stations were a really important part of forging those connections. So as I began to dig, I started to realize just what a political story this was, and that it fit actually very well into my identity as a policy, political historian wonk, I guess.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:42  
So let's talk some about the research, because there must have been a ton of research that went into this book. And of course, you're looking at college radio, which I'm sure did not always keep great records. This is, you know, before college radio would have been online. It probably wasn't always recorded. So what does it look like to look into this history? Where, where do you find this information? How did you even figure out which stories to tell?

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  14:11  
So I really benefited in launching this project, from some advice by a friend of mine at Fitchburg State, and she encouraged me, it's my coworker, Christine D. She said, "You know, for your next book project, try and find something where the records are going to be relatively accessible, where you're not going to have to go on factfinding visits. There are small collections, you can do one day research trips, things that you can fit in to your schedule, here and there or that are online, digitized. And so the first place that I went to look for is there a history here that I can really talk about that's going to be documented was digitized student newspapers. So that was a place where I could go and get a sense of you know, did a station have controversies or conversations that were kind of rising to the attention of the university community as a whole. So those are usually my first stop, if I didn't see an archival collection, which were, they're pretty fairly common to have archival collections, but they tend to be fairly limited in scope, because we are relying on college students to realize that they should box things up and send them to the archives. So it's very rare to find an extensive collection that's in an archive that covers the station's entire history, unless, unfortunately, that station has gone away. That's where I would find the more complete sets of records. So obviously, I didn't want to find that, even though I did. In the case of say, like Rice University, I found their records or if there was a station move, sometimes they would box everything up. And so I'd benefit from that. Or if there was a big anniversary, you know, say the 75th anniversary of the station, a lot of times there'll be a lot of record collecting that would go on as a result of that. So those were sort of the two main sources that I had any kind of archival collections, and they tended to be pretty accessible. I think the largest collection I ran into is the one at Yale, which because of the pandemic, I never even actually got to go visit in person. But it was extremely large, many, many, many boxes. I don't even remember how many, but most of them were about between one and 10 boxes of archival material. So pretty doable. And a lot of them would be like FCC logs, which I don't do that kind of history. So I was not looking at, you know, technical specs of transmitter logs or that kind of thing. So I could usually go in a day in an afternoon and get what I needed from an archive or have it scanned. And luckily archivists are very generous people, and especially during the pandemic, they were very, very helpful at scanning things and sending me things or photocopying things. Major thanks go out to the archivists at Loyola Marymount, who photocopied basically the entire collection of KXLU for me. It was such a rich resource, and so valuable. But that being said, there's still so many gaps in this history that the recorded record is really not there. It's in the tapes of DJs in their attics, if they've held on to them, or in their scrapbooks and their memories. And so I did do a lot of oral histories. I did a lot of interviews. Luckily, this is a relatively recent history. And so I was able to rely on that as well. But there's so much out there that is not documented, and groups that would have shows on stations who really weren't included as part of the larger kind of governance structure. And so their records weren't always preserved. So there's a lot of voices that are left out of this, these archives as with archives in general, but in particular, in this case, because of the kind of institutional nature of college radio.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:10  
So you mentioned earlier, how did this even come into being that colleges let students onto the airwaves? Could you talk a little bit about the other competing interests there are in a college radio station, like all the different constituencies it's serving or maybe not serving very well, all the different people who think that they have a claim in making decisions about what things should look like?

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  18:36  
Yeah, and this is this is really, where the the heart of the story is, in this book was around these competing interests, because I think one of the things I discovered very early on is that these stations were not just, you know, sort of a political entity kind of fighting for one type of radio, but rather, they the stations themselves are a kind of battleground over these kind of larger culture wars issues about what culture should sound like, what should the role of universities be, in shaping the public square, facilitating the public square, facilitating urban renewal, cultural uplift, right, with all the sort of ickiness that that word might entail? All of those kinds of tensions were very much present at these stations, including all the way to the educational functions of universities. Are they there as engines of economic development, to train students for jobs,  with the particular skills required by those professions? Or are they engines of knowledge and cultural creation and exploration where the market function isn't necessarily known or or predetermined? And so first and foremost, these stations are pedagogical. That's really where they come from. That's students playing around with, you know, an electrical engineering departments way back in the teens and the 20s. That's where a lot of stations started. So it's about doing radio, giving students that kind of hands on experience, whether in engineering departments or in communications departments, or journalism departments, or broadcasting, if they want to go on into that career field. The thing is, though, that they also embody the liberal arts functions of universities as well, which is about providing a space for students to find their voice, to figure out how to express themselves, and putting together a radio show or exploring a genre of music that they might not otherwise have thought to explore, or connecting with community groups, or activist groups or political issues, having conversations on the air, all of those, all of those groups had legitimate claims to these stations from within the universities. But these radio stations exist on the public airwaves, meaning that the people in range of them also have a claim to them. And so as a university occupying space in a city or an area, because not all universities are in cities, the people surrounding the universities, you know, could pick them up once they're on FM, if they weren't AM carrier current stations. And for a long time, most universities really valued making that connection with community members, not all and it had, oftentimes, it's very fraught, and contested. And they, but they at least valued having those kinds of connections. And I think that's where the real danger is, in any kind of decline of college radio is in universities no longer valuing having that kind of connection, you know. So whatever the pedagogical function of the station is, if it's in that larger conversation, there will be that back and forth. And you know, might not always be pretty, but it would at least give the station some kind of claim to being a public forum over these larger issues. But at the same time, you know, students don't always agree. Surprise! College students can be a very contentious lot. And a lot of them have really legitimate claims to critiquing these stations as a kind of normative mouthpieces for a certain idea of what campus culture would look like. So in the 60s, and the 70s, the campus movement, the Black campus movement, Black students were critiquing these stations. As you know, another example, like they were critiquing academic programs and admissions policies, that these stations weren't exempt from that. And so they become these stations become a really important crossroads for students to be able to figure out what they want the university to be supporting in terms of its public face of who the student body is, and what kinds of outreach that the university is going to be doing. There's a lot of there's a lot of claimants. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:16  
 Yeah, well, so another point of contestation there is that the these are often funded, at least partially by student student fees, students paying fees, maybe other institutional money, sometimes donors, but then the license holder is the university or university administration and not the students. So can you talk some about the ways that that plays out and the way that the FCC will end up siding with the university over the students because of that?

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  23:48  
Yeah. And I think, you know, it cuts to this larger question, which is very much in the news, certainly still right now about student free speech. And that, you know, a lot of students will make that claim of, you know, the university is trying to censor when they can maybe come into a station and want it to shift programming. Although the mechanisms for that are never quite so overt. There's only a few handful of examples of an administration coming in to kind of like wholesale taking over or getting rid of a station for those stated reasons. But there, there are ways that they're pressuring stations or supporting them and trying to push them into certain types of programming. So sort of the flagship example of this, I guess, we'll say, would be when the University of California at Santa Barbara gets in trouble for playing a raunchy song, and the PMRC the Parents Music Resource Council and Tipper Gore, get involved. And it's this kind of textbook kind of culture wars battle over content and at first, even the university tries to claim, "Well, this is student free speech. We can't get involved because it's a student publication." And the FCC is like, "No, like, that doesn't apply at all, because it's the public airwaves, we regulate it. And so we have the say." And so universities have kind of defaulted since the 1960s and 1970s, to letting students have kind of free rein over any form of student media, and that included radio. There was an interesting court case that actually originated from the institution where I'm at, Fitchburg State, which is a regional public institution in Massachusetts. In 1970, students sued the university president because he censored the student newspaper. And it went to the District Court, Judge Garrity, he of the busing decision, that led to busing in Boston. He ruled that the university acted improperly and couldn't cancel this publication of the student newspaper, which included they reprinted an Eldridge Cleaver essay. And he thought this was very offensive. And so he tried to stop publication. And UCSB actually cited that case, in trying to defend against the PMRC. And it just didn't fly. It just doesn't work when you move from the print into the broadcast media. And so you see universities kind of trying to catch up with this very visible space of college radio as it gains a lot of prominence in the music industry, that a lot of people weren't really paying attention until college radio became this, you know, sort of renowned place for kind of cultural exploration, and being out there on the fringes of of musical experimentation. And that that really kind of puts them in the center of these larger culture wars battles. Of course, at the same time that universities themselves are much more in the crosshairs of those kinds of content based culture wars battles.

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:08  
So let's pick up on this musical experimentation piece. And I think it's so interesting to think about the format of college radio, and that you mentioned block scheduling earlier, and how unlike the radio stations that especially today, we might be familiar with, because they're so commercialized and all owned by the same people where it's like, this is the format that this radio station is going to play this kind of music 24 hours a day. What does this look like? What do college radio station programs look like? And how does this lead to this relationship with the music industry, both record labels, but then also actual musical groups themselves?

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  27:46  
Yeah, so the thing about college radio is, it's this really wide ranging set of stations. So you can have say Fordham's radio station in New York with 50,000 watts, which is, you know, it's very professionally run, as a big point of contention. It's a piece I had to take out of the book, and I'm going to be using in a future publication. But there was all sorts of protests over the professionalization of that station, basically becoming more of an NPR type station, you know. So professional run commercial stations, most of the Ivy League stations are actually on the commercial band, they sell advertisements, even if they are so kind of freeform, all the way down to these little 10 watt stations, without any kind of programming ethos whatsoever. It's just sort of whoever as a show, come in, do what you want. So there's all sorts of different ways that they're set up. Some have a real desire to emulate commercial radio, because that's the experience that they want to give their students. But collectively, in the early 1980s, this idea of college radio as being alternative radio that develops in the 1970s, and that, I don't mean alternative rock, I mean, just alternative to what's on commercial radio, that college radio develops this reputation, collectively, that it is where you can go to find genres that aren't getting picked up into the way that FM radio is being divided up across formats. We get the rise of what we will come to think of as narrow casting, of dividing the broadcast spectrum up so that this station would play to this particular demographic only. And then you go down here to hear this demographic data. You know, this is where we get country radio, urban radio AOR album oriented rock radio on the commercial spectrum. And so college radio is where you could go to find reggae and funk and jazz and weird noise music at night or classical music or eventually, the sound of punk rock and new wave, which would eventually be picked up in commercial formats. But there was this sense that college radio was the place where you could go to experiment with these different types of sounds. And the music industry starts to pay attention to that, as it, it faces some financial issues in the late 1970s, along with the rest of the nation. It starts cutting back some of its college radio promotions. But by the early 1980s, it starts to incorporate college radio more into its business model, as a place to test new product, we'll call it product, because that was certainly the way that they thought of it. At the same time, that those stations are starting to value reaching out more into these underground scenes and do the work of exploring new music and featuring local sounds so that it gives record labels a place to find new talent as well. And so those stations are also paying attention to professional practices like reporting, their charts, tracking with their playing to sales at local record stores. So they're, so they're really engaged in a form of professional tracking in ways that the music industry values and the music industry that was promoting. So you get the rise of a publication like "CMJ," which publishes bi weekly tip sheets that are tracking what college radio stations are playing. And so that gives the student music director, a lot of power to say, you know, here's the music that our listeners are requesting, that our DJs are playing. And it's getting reported and pulled up into an industry publication that is getting a lot of attention. And you go from this kind of messy landscape of college radio, into something that has real commercial power in just a matter of a few years, really.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:06  
So I was really interested in this idea of you talked about it being an alternative radio space, and some of these stations that are so committed to being the alternative or independent, that they either don't want to play major record labels at all, or they think once a band is also on MTV or whatever, depending on what era we're looking at, like they're too big, we can't play them anymore. Could you talk a little bit about that, and the tensions between that and what the students on the campus who are paying student fees for the radio might want to listen to that top 40 kind of music?

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  32:41  
Yes. So there's, there's a real tension over whether or not these stations should be you know, the, the a lot of times are referred to as like a jukebox, you know, if they just play the best hits, and whatever students want to hear. And of course, this is a time when we don't have streaming. So you can't just like pull up whatever the top hits are and like have a robot kind of curate, you know, the most popular sounds for you. And your records are expensive. And so students, you know, they did want this service, and they had a real claim to it. But my favorite quote is from I think it was a DJ, at the University of North Carolina, who says, "We don't just go down to the campus art museum and want to see 200 copies of the Mona Lisa, that our role is educational. And on our radio station that includes educating students about all this other music that they could be listening to." And I think that's what's so fascinating about that moment of transformation in in the early 1980s, and the music industry is taking notice, is that the student practitioners of radio and community DJs as well, are really taking seriously this idea of educational radio, as doing service in music and cultural creation, of giving air to these sounds that otherwise wouldn't be heard in a kind of wide ranging way. Certainly, there's limits to this right that they have their blinders on, that a lot of time it, it was mostly white artists that a lot of students were playing, mostly male artists, that, you know, kind of rose to the top of playlists. But they they weren't very genuine in that desire to serve an educational function that they they use it defensively, against any kind of, you know, attempts to make them play all the hits all the time. But I think that they were very committed to that as an idea added at a very crucial moment. So it actually helped carve out and protect these stations as serving serving that role. And as that reputation develops, as they prove that they have this kind of market function as you get bands like REM, that do then cross over from the college rock into the mainstream scene, people, you know, recognize that there is there is value to that. And it does end up giving them the protections that they wanted. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:16  
One of the things, of course, though anything run by college students is that college students don't stay very long. They graduate and move on. And so there's this interesting tension sometimes between occasionally there's like a professional staff member or two at a radio station. There's the student volunteers, whatever percentage is student volunteers. And then there's often community members too, who are DJing. Could you talk about that some? And, you know, this goes back to that earlier question about the various aims and competing tensions. But what that looks like in terms of trying to run a radio station when the people who are running the radio station are graduating or get busy with other things, and don't always have the same schedule available, what that might look like.

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  36:01  
Yeah, that there's varying levels of kind of commitment that are often thrown at different partisans, let's say at different moments of time of, you know, certainly there's a lot of turnover in student staff. And a lot of that translates to the leadership of stations as well, because most student run stations are student activities, meaning they get funded through student fee. Sometimes those are held up to referendum votes, if students are really unhappy with the station, they will actually hold a referendum and try and claw back some of that student fee funding if they don't think that this station is serving the student body in the way that they want, with those popular demands, sort of as part of that conversation. So because they're student activities, that means that students have to hold the positions of leadership, because they're the ones who have to go and represent the students, usually to the Student Government Association. So it's usually required in the part of their bylaws that the President and Vice President and Executive Board staff, be students. The thing is, is that you'll have stations though with a long term community DJ roster. So the local station here in Boston, MIT's WMBR, that's, that's one of those stations where there are programs on there that have been on for 40 plus years. And sometimes there are there are DJs, that have been there that whole time. You know, so they, they know that institutional history, deeply. They're deeply connected to the communities that those shows serve. And so where the real tension arises, where you may get, you know, a certain group of students who come in, who maybe have a different vision, and they're the ones in the position of power, and so they can change the hours of those shows. They can kind of displace those DJs, or in the case of, say, what happened at my radio station, administrations can come in and change the rules about who gets to participate and make it student only. And a lot of stations are student only not every station brings in community members. But that really is at the discretion of the institution, as the license holder. And that was the first sign that the institution had it in for the station was that they first got rid of all of the community and alumni DJs. And this is in Music City, Nashville, Tennessee. So you can imagine the kind of community DJs that our station had, right, like, deeply connected to the country music, you know, bluegrass, like, I mean, just amazing community DJs were on that station for many years. DJ Ron, who was still on, he was on when I was there, but he had a show starting in 1994, on Saturday nights, called, "Out of the Closet." It was a gay dance music show in the buckle of the Bible Belt. And that show lasted until right before they got rid of all the community DJs, I think starting in the they did that around 2007- 2008. I'm probably mis-remembering that but it was before the sale. And, you know, that was an institution in Nashville, and he was connected to activist groups. And you know, it was a lifeline for young people who, you know, were struggling figuring out who they were and as well as like a major like place to go for like fun music on a Saturday night on the radio dial. You know, so getting rid of an institution like that on the radio station had a real effect on the community. And sometimes institutions value that and and that's, that's great, but it is at their discretion, and so it's always a little bit of a tenuous thing.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:53  
Let's talk then a little bit about sort of moving into the present, because of course, everything has changed with radio since 2000. And it's clear from your book that there were already changes happening, like it's not the internet that changes everything. But the internet then comes along and continues the changes of everything. Obviously, we are talking on a podcast, which is a totally different thing that didn't exist when the two of us were in college. So can you talk a little bit about what the landscape looks like now?

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  40:23  
So what's interesting is that I think we're seeing a real return to the broad diversity of college radio, where student DJs feel much less tied to this idea that college radio is an engine of musical discovery. And of that, it must be out there kind of on the fringes of, of whatever's new. Certainly, it continues to serve those functions, and especially showcasing local music. But I think we're at this really exciting moment where, even though there are dangers in, you know, the decline of this type of media and a potential lack of institutional investment, I think it's an exciting moment, because it's a moment where we could really let students and community members figure out new functions for these stations, and to look more broadly at how they have functioned in the past as those connective points between institutions and communities or as innovative ways of sharing information and creating conversation. And I think college students are really creative and innovative. And I think if we let them if we give them the space to do that, they will come up with really interesting things for these stations to do, and ways for them to work. And the biggest threat, though, to doing that is the fact that our students don't have the time, because they have to go and work to get themselves through college, you know. So my students at my institution in participation is way down and student radio, not because they don't want to do radio, or they don't think that radio is valuable, because they have to go work at Dunkin's for eight hours after they go to class. And, and so to me that that's the real threat to college radio, is our broader disinvestment from a higher education and supporting these institutions and all of the many types of public goods that they facilitate. You know, on the one hand, it is a sort of tragedy of looking to these institutions to serve all of these many functions as engines of economic development and urban renewal and workforce development and cultural creation, and, you know, all the many things that we ask many functions that we asked universities to perform; but in the process of looking at those relationships, we're in danger of getting rid of some of the most valuable functions that they do perform, and can perform, particularly in a media space. And podcasting, I could go on and on about podcasting, but there again, is that kind of democratic media, where anybody can do it. And college radio had that kind of ethos about it. Anybody could get on the airwaves, anybody can do it. The same, same thing goes in with podcasting. The thing is, is that we see in podcasting, a very similar thing happening, it's happened in radio, which is the well funded, institutionalized broadcasters are the ones that kind of monopolize the conversation and get the most streams and kind of drown out the small producers. And so it all comes back to the forms of institutional support that we provide to content creators.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:56  
And a good plug to listen to independent podcasts. So it's a fascinating book. I think anyone would be interested, but especially anyone who was involved in college radio or just who went to college between 1970 and 2000, I think will get a lot out of this book. And of course, former Unsung History guest Kevin Kruse shows up in the book too. So how can listeners get a copy? 

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  44:22  
Well, you can go to UNC press for copy and bookshop.org too. It's available in paperback, as well as ebook and it will be available as an audiobook soon. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:36  
Excellent. Well, Kate, thank you so much for speaking with me. This was great. 

Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell  44:40  
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was awesome. 

Music  44:55  
[Musical interlude]

Teddy  45:03  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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