Radio Flyer

Last night, the wife noticed that WCAL has now changed hands,
and is being operated by MPR. The wife is a contrarian in all things,
and she said the new announcers sounded “robotic.” But the wife is,
like us, a St. Olaf graduate. She is predisposed to resist change (like
us), especially when it involves her alma mater. Many non-alumni
listeners may be pleasantly surprised to learn that the classical
programming continues—at least for the time being.

Around here, we’ve already received one angry letter for our “Good Intentions”
which mentioned the controversy. In that piece, we did not so much
mourn the passing of WCAL—it’s not really going anywhere, after all.
And if you insist that WCAL IS dead in body and spirit, then MPR is
certainly the best possible heaven you could go to if you were a
deceased radio station. What we were complaining about was St. Olaf’s
decision to sell it in the first place.

It turns out that MPR may be the hero of this story. Despite the broad grumbling we hear among honorable people
that MPR is growing more conservative and homogenous and powerful—we
suspect that St. Olaf would have sold the station to just about anyone,
so desperate were they to liquidate this asset. (St. Olaf alumni are
familiar with this strategy going back at least to the eighties, when
then-president Melvin George sold many of the priceless Persian rugs
that hung on the walls of Ole Rolvaag Library, just to drum up a little
cash.) In a press release issued yesterday, MPR made it clear that they
bought the charming little station “in an attempt to save the frequency
for public service programming. Other bidders proposed more narrow,
targeted program services.”

Coincidentally, we happened to
pick up Tom Wolfe’s new novel last night. It bears all the earmarks of
a classic Wolfe read— so many details so wrong, so much clanging
language, and yet so irritatingly readable. “My Name is Charlotte” is
set in a fictional college called Dupont. One of the things that Wolfe
gets exactly right is the strange form of loyalty that a good, solid
college generates in its students and alumni. These are, after all, the
formative years of our adult life. If you’re lucky enough to attend a
somewhat prestigious private college, and engaged with it enough to
hold on for four years, its astonishing the things you find yourself
remembering and saying about the experience later.

So our own
attachment to WCAL had quite a lot to do with its affiliation with that
old college on a hill. But it’s useful to remember that many people who
never knew or cared about WCAL’s ownership loved the station for what
it was, sui generis. They can take some consolation that some of the
station’s signature programming will live on, including “Favorites on
Friday” and—something MPR secretly coveted for decades—the St. Olaf
Choir Christmas Concert. Sometimes our self-important view of ourselves
and our institutions actually comports with the outside world’s
view.—The Editor in Cheese


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