Students protesting the closing of Cleveland State University’s historic student-led radio station WCSB. (Credit: Mario Benjamin)
The white ON AIR light was still glowing when the cops walked in. A tiny bulb in a dirty old studio, shining on as if it had no idea its world was about to change. It was October 3, National College Radio Day. The one day meant to honor the weird, chaotic magic that stations like 89.3 WCSB were built on when Cleveland State University sent police officers to escort students from the airwaves they’d been broadcasting from for nearly half a century. No warning. No goodbye show. Within hours, the eclectic collage of punk, jazz, metal, and noise vanished from the dial, replaced by a neat, polished stream of 24/7 jazz as the university handed the signal over to Ideastream Public Media, Cleveland’s consolidated public broadcasting giant that runs the city’s NPR and PBS stations
This happened in Cleveland, of all places. The city where the words “rock and roll” were first transmitted across the airwaves and into the bloodstream of America, accidentally crowning this industrial pocket of the Midwest the Rock and Roll Capital of the world. This was a place where a strange new sound had a fighting chance if one DJ liked it enough. Now, it’s a place where a state-funded university quietly removed its own students from the airwaves. There was no emergency or misconduct requiring an officer in a doorway. Just a deliberate administrative decision, filtered through the lens of a nonsensical perspective that burying a half-century of music and counterculture is somehow good for its students and the community it served…