Check out photos from Saturday’s concert here >

There will be an open forum meeting to discuss the KTRU sale this Wednesday, September 1st. It will begin at 7:30pm in Sewall Hall, Room 301. Look at this map to find Sewall 301: http://www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html. Everyone, including the Rice administration, is invited to attend. There will be FREE T-shirts, pizza, and music!

I came to KTRU and Rice in 2004 as a transfer student from the University of Texas at Austin, where I had DJed at KVRX Austin from 2003-2004. I was so happy to join KTRU because it provided a sense of community on Rice’s campus – walls of albums I recognized, millions of ones I didn’t, and memorabilia from past shows and messages from past DJs stuck to the ceiling, floors, and walls. Moreover, while KVRX was suffering from battles with the UT administration, KTRU had at least tacit support from the Rice administration, and while KVRX had to time-share with KOOP, KTRU ran 24 hours a day.

My first semester, I shared a shift with a Rice computer science professor, Ian, who told me about The Chills, whose Submarine Bells album I still enjoy. As a college sophomore I was really into bands like The Impossibles, Rainer Maria, and a little bit of Shonen Knife, but The Chills’s New Wave started me listening to Goldfrapp, Joy Division, Go-Betweens, Arcade Fire, Chromatics, and a host of artists that I now enjoy. KTRU is special among student organizations at Rice, and frankly, among student organizations at most universities, in that faculty, graduate students, undergrads, and Houston community members all work together with the common goal of widening their knowledge of music and sharing it with the Houston community. Nowhere else on campus do undergrads have the opportunity to mingle with a cohort that diverse, manage a large staff, run an FCC licensed media outlet, develop large events with well-known acts, interview musicians and Oscar-winning directors (I got to interview Ross Kaufman and Dana Briski of Born Into Brothels for the news show the day after they won the Academy Award because KTRU had been sent a review copy of their film), learn sound engineering, media software, public speaking, news writing, communication law, marketing, event booking, and more all in one place.

The skills I learned at KTRU, from serving as DJ Director from 2005 to 2007 (if memory serves), got me my first post-graduation job at a public relations firm in Austin, and then as an intern, writing for Morning Edition with WBUR Boston, and then as an Editorial Assistant with Boston Review magazine. As a Rice undergrad, I volunteered with a lot of student organizations, but no professional experience continues to be more attractive to employers than the time I spent at KTRU. I am confident that I would not have landed any of those jobs without the professional experience I gained at KTRU.

KTRU not only shaped me as a person, as the place I met my best friends at Rice and the place where I expanded my taste in music, but it shaped my career. And I still listen to the station regularly, even from across the country.

Lauren Ames
Jones, 2007

When I came to rice in the Fall of 2000, I had already planned to join KTRU. I began listening to KTRU after my acceptance online and looked forward to joining the ranks the following year. In my mind, it was one of the touchstones of a college experience, than i knew I was going to get at Rice with a radio station to which people actually had access and which served a community.

In my second semester I shared a graveyard shift with Mark Flaum, who continues to KTRU today. In fact, he just (yesterday, I believe) got married to another KTRU colleague. I would continue at KTRU for most of my time at Rice, letting up in my senior year to pursue professional opportunities. And, in 2007 while returning to Houston to complete an internship for my Master’s Degree, I again took up a general programming shift.

I come from Los Angeles, a place where, perhaps due to the time we are stuck in our cars, we have excellent radio options that are extremely influential in local culture. With the popularity of terrestrial radio in Southern California I can not support the assertion that it is losing value. In fact, having returned to LA in the years following my departure from Houston, I only see it as a growing influence.

In my time at KTRU I met some of my dearest friends, I learned responsibility to an organization and an audience, I learned how to push limits within rules, I learned about new sounds and I learned how a 24/7 content provider works. Now, as a producer for live events, these are all key skills that I continue to draw on, and KTRU is proudly listed on my resume as professional experience, not an extracurricular activity.

I stood vigil with my classmates and community partners to keep KTRU on the air the last time it was shut-down and, with my DJ partner, I was the first live voice on the radio in Houston after 9/11. Though we do not have the reach of a top 40 station and may not have the same draw as an NPR affiliate, both of these events showed me how important the station was to many people. Playing requests for a city in shock from a national tragedy will do that.

Please don’t take this opportunity and community away from students by relegating it an online only format. Even here in Los Angeles, where radio is powerful, we recently lost an independent commercial station to the internet and our airwaves are that much poorer for it. Rice has the capability of providing for students and the greater Houston community a resource that is extremely rare these days. Don’t sell it out.

Ian Garrett

Will Rice 2004

Wow! What a turnout! It was great seeing such a public outpouring of support for the station—reminds us that KTRU is as much an asset of the community as it is Rice’s. The bands rocked, and people had a great time. Thanks to everyone involved, we gathered tons of signatures for our petition, donations for our struggle, and one “will you go out with me” note. The DJs working the booth are still trying to sort out who the note was for.

More photos from the benefit can be seen here.

KTRU is a valuable dispenser of underserved culture in Houston. Contemporary music is vital to the health of culture. Music like language is constantly evolving and changing. It is all important for the public to have access and be exposed to the newest music being composed or improvised and performed as well as music of the past. I would not like to see KTRU change to Classical Music format. There are other stations that serve this constituency very well. The students at Rice Institute deserve to continue their tradition of bringing contemporary music to Houston listeners.

Pauline Oliveros (Native Houstonian)

http://paulineoliveros.us/

To be released November 1, 2010:

Rice President David Leebron announced today that the Rice Board of Trustees has approved a long-term lease of Recking Park to West University Little League for $10 million, beginning in 2012. Rice will discontinue its Division 1 baseball program.

“Many at Rice have enjoyed our baseball program, but in these challenging economic times, we must make hard decisions. The baseball program was outside our core mission as a university. Other universities do quite well without baseball programs. SMU discontinued its baseball program many years ago.”

Rice plans to use the $10 million to improve faculty parking and on-campus dining options for students and staff. Rice was unable to allocate even 1 per cent from the $1 billion capital fund campaign currently underway for these needed improvements, or support them through user fees.

President Leebron explained, “Our recent experience with the sale of KTRU’s transmitter and license led us to look for additional opportunities to liquidate underutilized assets, and leasing Reckling Park and discontinuing the baseball program compared favorably to the KTRU transaction. In fact, we wondered why we didn’t think of it first.”

KTRU was created by students, and operated almost entirely with a volunteer student staff, plus one paid administrator. In contrast, Rice had baseball for purely historical reasons, and had to support it with scholarships for athletes, 3 full-time paid coaches, plus much administrative staff.

KTRU cost Rice nothing to operate. The baseball program had significant operating costs beyond salaries.

As for the impact on the Rice community and the city at large, Leebron pointed out, “KTRU reached thousands of Houstonians every single day. The baseball team played typically less than 60 dates a year, only half of them at Reckling Park, and typically before crowds of only a couple of thousand fans. And it was always underutilized in terms of making an impact on the community. It rarely received more than a few column inches of coverage in the back pages of the Houston Chronicle sports section. Most students were indifferent to the games; rarely more than 100 of them attended a single game. Now seemed the right time to lease the stadium, as baseball is suffering from competition with video games and the internet as entertainment, particularly among young adults. Our alumni can always go watch the Astros, which occasionally employ former Rice baseball players.”

The Board of West University Little League expressed its great pleasure in acquiring the lease. “We are getting a first-rate facility that we can use almost year round. We will be able to better accommodate the over 1,200 children who play baseball in our program with this facility, forty times the number of baseball players at Rice.”

President Leebron noted, “I regret that we had to negotiate this deal in secret. I know it will irritate longtime fans of the Rice baseball program who were not given an opportunity to express their views on the wisdom of this decision. But frankly, we determined there just aren’t that many of them. And with the sale of KTRU, we couldn’t even broadcast the baseball games to those fans. Small as the number of fans may be, we knew that if they were allowed to express their views, the sale might not go through.”

(As you may have guessed, this is a parody). Original source »

“Classical music fans in the city’s southern and western suburbs may not be able to hear the station intended to serve their interests.”

“‘It’s all static,’ Clear Lake resident Jay Bennett said of the radio signal that would be designated for classical music and arts programming if the deal goes through. ‘It seems odd that they would degrade their (classical music) signal and alienate a lot of their listeners.'”

Read the full article here >

“The last time student, or community, input was gathered in earnest was during the Call to Conversation in 2005: Two years before any current undergraduate student had even matriculated. The truth is that the desires of the students have been consistently overlooked in favor of decisions aimed at increasing Rice’s visibility and profit. It looks more and more like the Vision for the Second Century is about benefits at the end of the second century than the beginning.”

Read the complete article here (free registration necessary)>

“Even though it’s true that KTRU will be broadcasting via the Internet regardless of the outcome it’s the actual radio transmission that allows the station to bring in new listeners. Everyone knows that KTRU won’t be completely dissolved but that doesn’t matter. Once the station loses its frequency it just becomes another one of the endless rabble of online radio stations. Albeit it will still function as an excellent online radio station, there’s no way one can accidentally discover a streamed station the same way one can on the FM dial. The tower and frequency are integral to the spirit of the station and its local nature.”

Read the full post here >

“To accept the ends is to condone the means. Thus, one cannot claim simultaneously that the sale of the KTRU signal was justifiable but that the administration’s secrecy was not. Endorsing the sale of KTRU based on the proposed improvements it would provide would send the administration a message that its actions – including its willful circumvention of student opinion – are acceptable. In a response e-mail, President Leebron directed us to ‘hold [the administration] to [its] word that this is not a precedent.’ We propose a better option. Do not sanction the sale to begin with.”

Read the full article here >

“Personally, I’m beyond the arguments of Arbitrons versus educational value. It’s not 1976 anymore. The world we run in these days is one in which public and community radio depend on listener data, period. But in the same non-1976 world, leadership takes steps to correct ratings problems before shuttering stations. If nothing was done to correct the declining Arbitrons, why bring it up?”

Read the full post here >

Donations will be accepted at the show, and posters, shirts, and albums will be for sale.

“I was also pleased to see that a number of people affiliated with University of Houston are also opposing the sale by showing up at rallies, organizing Facebook groups and speaking in favor of student radio at Rice University. A columnist at the University of Houston paper even pointed out that the arrival of a second radio station on campus won’t benefit students at either institution.”

“In an interesting twist, the folks at Save KTRU are reporting that fans of public radio and classical music (who have been happy to hear of University of Houston’s plans to expand the public radio network with this purchase) in Houston will actually be disappointed by the proposals on the table for the new all-classical station on KTRU’s current spot on the dial. Apparently the broadcast range for the new classical station will be much smaller than the existing classical station on KUHF. So who wins?”

Read the full post here >

My freshman year, KTRU gave me a sense of community that I had not found anywhere. Through KTRU, I met a few of my best friends, with whom I am still in touch. The common ground of music appreciation also allowed divisions such as music-major / non-music-major to disappear; through the scordatura show, I met a friend with whom I established a chamber music club that included musicians of all levels of experience. In this case, the community of KTRU created more community.

Ann Wang

Martel 2008