12/30/2025
College Radio Forever!
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 es**rt 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.
The person steering this decision was Cleveland State’s president, Dr. Laura Bloomberg, who was already talking up the partnership as something “built on opportunities for students” while she was breaking in her new seat on the board of trustees at Ideastream—a perk she may have been secretly negotiating for six months prior. Standing beside her was Ideastream CEO Kevin Martin and a stack of agreements: the eight-year Program Service and Operating Agreement, the Memorandum of Understanding, the promised promotional slots, and the hazy internship section with no real figures or numbers to substantiate any significant student involvement. It all amounted to a slow, polite gaslighting, suggesting that dismantling a space where students and community members could experiment, screw up, and find their voices organically would somehow elevate them by turning them into interns on someone else’s tidy, polished jazz show.
Read the full feature at the link in bio.
