“For me, KTRU would be a tragic loss, and one that I would miss. It has been one of the programmed buttons on my car radio for as long as I have listened to that station, beginning in the late 1970s. And like many Houstonians, part of my musical education has come from that station – music, I should add, that would not get airplay on any other radio station in town. KTRU has served as a springboard for many up-and-coming bands that need a venue to reach the public. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of all this is the station’s complete air of spontaneity – as I have found time and time again, I never know what to expect when I tune it. It is always different, always fresh, and always unexpected – and that is a benchmark for a learning experience. Likewise, the student body that operated the station over the years have crafted their own learning experience in the ways of media and communication.”

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View a clip from of the protest on the KHOU website here >

“It makes me sick that Houston and Rice University would lose the best, most diverse radio station in the area. Because that means Houstonians and Rice students have one less way to discover the rich musical underbelly that is teeming well below the Lady Gaga/Katy Perry surface. Surely discovery has to count for something. Right?”

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“Tears were shed by several speakers before the statue of William Marsh Rice at Sunday afternoon’s KTRU rally. Drawing several hundred supporters, the event featured the words of KTRU djs, Rice University professors and community organizers. The mix of speakers underlined the radio station’s diverse listenership, and shed light on the personal connections people of various backgrounds share with KTRU.”

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Protesters listen to speakers at Sunday's rally to save KTRU

Braving oppressive sun, heat, and humidity, hundreds of members of both the Rice University and greater Houston communities convened on Rice’s academic quadrangle today at 2pm for a rally to save KTRU.

Carrying homemade signs and wearing KTRU t-shirts, the crowd listened as a series of speakers, including current students, faculty, and alumni, spoke about why KTRU should be saved. Speakers shared personal anecdotes, including tales of how KTRU had benefited their own lives and careers. Some reflected on the importance of KTRU to the larger Houston community and independent media. Others focused on deconstructing arguments used by the university administration to justify KTRU’s sale.

Members of KTRU’s student board stressed that they will not back down in the fight for the radio station. Station Manager Kelsey Yule asserted that even if the station were to go off the air this week, the fight that began when the news was announced publicly last Monday was “just the beginning.”

An audio recording of the full rally will be posted here soon. Please check back!

A Rice mathematics professor speaks at the rally.

Visit the Houston Chronicle website to view photos from the protest today >

“When Rice University alumna Rachel Orosco heard about her college’s plan to sell its student-run radio station, KTRU, to the University of Houston she became so distraught that she jumped on a flight to Houston to protest.”

“Orosco — a former KTRU station manager — was among roughly 200 students, faculty and community members who gathered on the Rice campus Sunday afternoon to protest the $9.5 million sale of the station’s broadcast tower, FM frequency and license.”

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I came to Rice for graduate school in the fall of 1997. I was younger than most of my fellow class, and frankly, I didn’t have much in common with them anyway. So when I found out about KTRU, I applied to be a DJ, and discovered a community of like-minded students passionate about music and the creative arts. I quickly got involved in the operations of the station well beyond the basic task of DJ-ing, eventually serving as an Assistant Music Director, Operations Manager, and Hip-Hop Director.

At KTRU I grew as a person, far more than I ever had from any of my formal education. I found my voice and learned to lead by example. I discovered skills and talents I never knew I had, like taking initiative and ownership of projects and seeing them through. And KTRU provided an outlet for some of the skills and hobbies I already possessed, like fiddling with electronics. In fact, that first year I took on the responsibility of holding together much of the equipment in the station. I remember spending over 12 hours in the studio that Thanksgiving day, DJ-ing 3 shifts and spending another few hours fixing equipment with solder, tape, and whatever else I could scrounge up. I went on to organize concerts and help with live broadcasts, among other things.

President Leebron wants to continue KTRU as an internet-only affair. I say that the radio broadcast ability of KTRU is an integral part of what makes it great. As a direct result of our broadcast ability, I have met and become friends with many individuals from the music industry nationwide as well as countless individuals from Houston’s greater arts and music communities. Our position as a voice for the underexposed side of Houston culture cannot be overvalued. On a smaller scale, I have received calls from individuals who just stumbled across my radio show and were excited to hear what I had been playing. Often these people told me that they had been Houstonites for years and never turned down to our end of the dial, but for whatever reason, they did this time. This happenstance acquisition of listeners can’t happen on the internet and consequently, KTRU as an internet-only affair is a losing proposition, one that will be unable to serve the greater Houston community.

It is stunning to me the casual disregard that Rice University’s administration has for the opinion of its own students, alumni, and extended community that they would make this deal in secret, with no discussion with the group of people who would be most affected by the transaction. Do they have the legal right to sell KTRU? Probably. But I have quite literally put hundreds of hours of sweat equity into KTRU, as have many other students, and thus I feel that in some small way, I am a part owner of KTRU. To sell it off without even so much as a discussion is disgusting.

I thank Rice University for providing me with my graduate education, but should this deal stand, I will no longer contribute financially to any other program affiliated with Rice.

Dennis Lee
Ph.D. ’05, Biochemistry and Cell Biology

“Student DJ Joey Yang, who helped organize the rally, spoke of Rice’s upcoming 100-year anniversary and the station’s 40-year history as a student-run entity. He said he’d learned that over a year ago Rice began looking for someone to take the station ‘off of their hands,’ to which someone in the audience angrily replied ‘It’s not their station!'”

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“If Leebron didn’t think he could lose this KTRU battle, then why would he try to keep it secret from anyone who would oppose, in potential violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act? If Leebron didn’t think he could lose, then why is Rice yet to file the transfer with the FCC?”

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“[KUHF] is an important part of the community and serves a great need but to expand its broadcasting by silencing KTRU is unconscionable and the fact that my university is allowing this sale to go through under the current circumstances leaves me feeling culpable.”

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KTRU helped me grow up during my years at Rice – the closest I came to holding responsibilities that the ‘real world’ entailed. Sure, the music was weird, and the hours during my first year were inconvenient. But if I didn’t show up at 1am on a Saturday night for my three-hour shift, the station would not operate. That was my first lesson in personal accountability. It is a lesson that won’t be taught to other students if KTRU were to move to an online-only format.

Nirav Bhagat, 2002, Jones College

I was never a DJ, but I was often mistaken for one.  I listened to KTRU and attended their events, but what’s more, I befriended the student community that surrounded the station.  Today, I still think of my old Rice friends as KTRU-friends and non-KTRU friends.  There’s something special about its people, almost like being another Rice within Rice, a wonderful community inside a great school.  That experience, perhaps more than the music, is the thing that new students will miss out on.

John Paul Yabraian – Will Rice ’96

KTRU in part always genuinely embodied the spirit of Rice – the spirit that drew me there in the first place.  A desire for experimentation, for learning, for pushing the boundaries and opening my previously narrow world into something new.  For doing things a different way, and an ethical way.  As Rice had no fraternities to gunk up the works and kept tuition (relatively speaking) low, KTRU took as its mission to play the music you wouldn’t hear anywhere else, instead of playing the same old songs that were on big radio.  As much as we might love Nirvana (back in my day, anyway), we didn’t need to play “Smell Like Teen Spirit” any more than it already got played on the radio elsewhere.  This was not just an interesting mission but an ethical one.

I think I learned as much in my days in KTRU as I did in many classes – not just about music, although that learning was eye-opening and still affects me almost daily – but about being open to new things and new people, about working with people, about connecting with a broader community at large.  Despite the administration’s insistence that nobody listens to KTRU, it mattered to have an audience, no matter how small, even if it was only that one guy who called in for a request, or that one woman who called in to ask “What was that you just played?”  I loved my time at Rice in total; but KTRU was certainly a big part of that.

And it was the very physical status of KTRU as an entity in the airwaves that made it special.  The way you could latch onto it from many parts of Houston and beyond, as we explored that massive, strange, wonderful city, crammed into friends’ cars.  The calls I received during my 4 am shift from workers getting up, or going to sleep, or people living in small towns outside of Houston that wondered what unusual song I had just played.  While the internet presence of KTRU may be useful to some, many in the community do not have access to that, as streaming internet radio has yet to be implemented in most cars, factories, and even many offices where such streaming is restricted.  There is no substitute for radio, even in an ipod age.

Personally, I’ll never forget that feeling having an amazing shift, or playing terrific and terrible music, of hearing something new and amazing for the first time, and then of leaving the station on a dark Sunday morning at 7 am, into a cool, soupy, pre-sunset moment, the smell of Houston’s industrial work in the air, the campus quiet, walking back to my dorm, tired but feeling amazing.

Part of my anger at the situation is the way that it was handled.  Had the student body, or their chosen representatives, or particularly the KTRU staff, been included in these decisions, it might be a different story.  Things change, and if the Rice student body and the Houston community truly do not want KTRU any more than I cannot argue with that.  But for this to be imposed from above is extremely disappointing.  And the manner in which it was executed, in the middle of the summer, while the student body was absent, is highly problematic.  An action like this, a swift removal from above without consulting the people to whom this station really mattered in fact suggests that Rice is no longer the place I attended and still think so fondly of.

Sincerely,
Jeff Ostergren
Hanszen 1998

I started my time at KTRU in late 2006 and was a DJ until I left Houston in August of 2009. After “paying my dues” with an awesome graveyard shift (a time frame that introduced me to music like Maserati, Telefon Tel Aviv, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Mono, and 65daysofstatic), I found myself joining MK Ultra, hosting alongside Scott Novich and Asif Hassan for a semester before taking the reins myself for more than a year.

During my stint on that Friday night 9-12 slot, we featured guest DJs from some of Houston’s most forward-thinking clubs and parties, conducted interviews with some of the most exciting and ground-breaking producers (Axwell, 2020 Soundsystem, Tim Xavier, Charles Feelgood, Kraddy, others), and promoted home-grown tracks, recent mixes, and events that were happening in the Houston area. We gave away tickets at regular intervals; the vast majority were snapped up within seconds of announcing their availability over the air. We received letters and correspondence from avid listeners (including a few from behind bars…very interesting stuff there, and I am assuming that they were listening over the airwaves and not the internet). I always felt like we had a substantial underground following in addition to the myriad of enthusiastic callers who would request track names, Myspace pages of guest DJs, or party information almost every week.

MK Ultra introduced me to styles of electronic music that I had never heard before, including dubstep, glitch-hop, and minimal – just being in the studio when tracks or edits were debuted was a tremendous experience. I made connections with the music community that I never dreamed of, including big-name local DJ crews like Gritsy, Texas Dub, Crossroads, and DIRB!, promoters and club owners from venues such as Rich’s, Dean’s, The Flat, the now-defunct La Strada, and Bar-Rio, and booking agents/managers from major record labels like Om Recordings and Moist Music.

MK Ultra was one of my most rewarding, defining, and challenging undergraduate experiences. It took up a lot of my time along the way, but was a part of my life that I will never forget. It saddens me to think that a forward-thinking station like KTRU and its hard-working DJs have been treated in such cruel and clinical fashion by the current Rice administration.

Paul Thompson
Baker (HELL YEAH) College
Class of 2009