KTRU News Roils, Saddens Local Music Community

It’s filled with impassioned responses from Houston music aficionados and those who have in the past and continue to contribute to our patchwork quilt of an arts community.

I missed the deadline while still on vacation. But based on the temperature of responses I would like to offer my own comments regarding the sale.

No one will argue that this situation is an incredible tragedy for independent music in Houston, for college radio in the nation, for the creative community of Houston. Even more sad is that we have to acknowledge at this point that students and the community at large hold very little power in reversing the decision to sell KTRU. This was punctuated by Rice’s choice not to include any of the stakeholders in the sale of the station. This decision is being viewed by those both inside and out of the Rice community as a betrayal of trust from an institution that prides itself in taking into account student needs and input for the improvement of their education and the university itself. Viewed from the University’s standpoint though, this was a well thought-out business decision to finally capitalize on an underused resource, and to finalize the deal at a time when there were few people around to raise objections.

The history of KTRU is as a terrestrial station, something people listened to in their cars, at home, with friends; the future of KTRU as an online-only station is an ersatz one at best. The polarized public outcry, retelling of stories of how KTRU shaped lives and careers and passions is a celebration of those terrestrial memories and of the way KTRU has changed lives.

We are about to lose a valuable asset to the Houston creative community. But this outpouring of public support is something that should make people surrounding KTRU happy, knowing that they made a difference. Furthermore, instead of remaining reactionary we can quickly turn this situation into an opportunity to galvanize our musical community to build something better. Pirate radio stations, more avenues for the exposure of live music in Houston, more local music programming in non-traditional areas. The celebration of the things that KTRU gave us in our lives and our passions doesn’t need to end, merely re-focused towards something greater.

This is a polarizing situation, with both sides having firm ground to stand on regarding the sale. On one hand, an around the clock NPR and news station would be a valuable add for the Houston area. On the other hand, the loss of a nationally important radio station providing a home for independent and eclectic music would be a tragedy not only for the Houston community but for college and independent radio on the whole.

I will compose my own personal thoughts about this sale in the coming days as I work through unproductive feelings and towards unbiased reflection. For now what I can say is that KTRU has played a formative role in my musical education and I have grown richer as a music fan through my ten years of DJing at KTRU.

I will keep this post updated with as much relevant information as possible concerning the sale of the station as well as resources for people to read more or get involved.

ACTIVIST LOCATIONS
savektru.org
Facebook Group

ARTICLES

Updated 8/18, 6:00AM
Culture Map: The winners and losers in the KTRU college radio deal
Culture Map: Save KTRU? Rice alums react with anger & resignation: President says secrecy unavoidable in radio deal
Houston Chronicle: UH deal finding no fans at KTRU
Houston Press: KTRU Staff, Supporters Vent, Discuss Plans To Fight Station’s Sale
Houston Press: KTRU News Roils, Saddens Local Music Community
KUHF: UH Regents to Vote on Radio Station Purchase

Updated 8/17, 3:00PM
Houston Chronicle: UH board considers plan to buy Rice radio station
Houston Press 1st post: KTRU: Is U Of H About To Buy Rice Student Station?
Houston Press: KTRU: U Of H Regents Approve Purchase Of Rice Station
29-95: Sadness Alert: KTRU Sale Finalized

RICE PUBLIC MENTIONS
President Leebron’s letter to ALL-RICE (posted at end)
Rice University press release about the sale: UH to buy radio frequency and transmission facilities from Rice

CALLS TO ACTION
If the sale of KTRU to KUHF is something that you are unhappy with, here are some things that you can do to express your displeasure. I will add additional items as they develop.

1. Use your social networks to express your concern about there being a home for independent culture and music in Houston.
2. You could write emails to Rice University President David Leebron, Vice President for Administration Kevin Kirby, University of Houston Chancellor  Renu Khatur, and any other decision makers you have contacts with at either Rice University, University of Houston, or KUHF. As Rice is one of my current employers I will not publicly post these people’s emails but they can be easily obtained from rice.edu or uh.edu.
3. Attend a 7pm public meeting with all KTRU DJs tonight at Sammy’s on Rice University campus in the Rice Memorial Center. Map here. All public and press are invited for this event.

I am writing to let you know that we have reached a preliminary agreement with the University of Houston System to purchase Rice’s 50,000-watt radio frequency and broadcast tower for use by Houston’s local public broadcasting station, KUHF. Rice’s station, KTRU, will continue to operate a Web-based radio station at www.ktru.org.

We made the decision to sell the radio tower and frequency for several reasons. The economic downturn which began two years ago has forced Rice — and virtually all colleges and universities across the country — to make hard choices to prioritize spending and maximize the use of our resources. As we have implemented necessary budget cuts over the past two years, our goal has been to focus on our core missions of teaching and research and, to the extent possible, to avoid layoffs. We have constantly asked, and will continue to ask, how we can best apply our resources to achieve our aspirations.

The KTRU tower stood out as one of the university’s most underutilized resources. In an era when Internet radio is rapidly growing in popularity, it became apparent that the 50,000-watt radio station that broadcasts KTRU’s programming is a valuable but vastly underutilized resource that is not essential to providing our students the wide range of opportunities they need, including media opportunities.

A recent Arbitron report showed that KTRU’s audience was so small that it did not even register in the ratings. Most college radio stations around the country have less than 5,000 watts, and since the late ’90s a number of them have added the online format and moved to online only.

At the same time, KUHF, Houston’s National Public Radio station, was looking for a way to provide both 24-hour all-news and all-classical music programming. Houston is the only major city in the country that lacks these dual services. To fill that gap, the University of Houston System expressed an interest in purchasing Rice’s FM frequency and tower, and we eventually agreed on a price of $9.5 million.
The sale must be approved by the UH Board of Regents at its meeting today, and then by the Federal Communications Commission.

Some of the sale proceeds will go toward the cost of the new East Servery, which will be adjacent to Lovett and Will Rice residential colleges on the south campus. This will both provide one of the most desired improvements to the residential experience in the south colleges, as well as help us achieve the overall capital plan approved by our board of trustees. We also plan to form a committee including students to provide input on other uses of the proceeds, such as for scholarships, improvements to recreational facilities and enhancements to the online station and other student media facilities and programs.

KTRU will continue to serve its campus and external audience with student-managed programming via www.ktru.org. The Internet already brings KTRU to national and global listeners, and there are opportunities for that audience to grow. Will Robedee, the station’s first general manager, will continue in that role.

KUHF plans to use the additional frequency to broadcast 24-hour classical music and fine arts programming on 91.7 FM; 88.7 FM will become its all-news channel. KUHF will raise funds to pay for the acquisition.

We realize that some loyal fans of KTRU may lament these changes, but it is important to remember that KTRU is not going away. Fans can still find KTRU’s unique blend of music and programming online. Meanwhile, a greater number of students can benefit from the improvements in campus facilities and offerings made possible by the sale of the broadcast tower.

As much as I prefer to consult widely and involve all stakeholders in important decisions, this sale required months of complicated and, by necessity, confidential negotiations. My management team and I approached those discussions always with the best interests of our students, faculty and alumni and the future of our university as our highest priorities.

For more information about the KTRU plans, see the story and FAQs on rice.edu.
Thank you, as always, for your hard work and dedication.
Warm regards,
David W. Leebron
President, Rice University

Take the course for a test drive:

As mentioned, Society in the Information Age examines the role of technology in our current society. The course will explore shifts in the realms of politics, religion, commerce, and personal relationships. We will also discuss our changing perceptions of property, privacy, authority, journalism, knowledge and identity.

In any honest examination of technology, positive and negative effects become apparent. It is rare that any new technology is met with ambivalence and this is because the introduction of any new technology results in winners and losers. This has always been the case even as far back  as the story in the semester begins, at the end of oral history and the beginning of the book. By starting at the beginning, we’ll focus on what was an incredibly disruptive technology to society and use that to enumerate the absolutes of any technological change. Moving forward, we’ll focus the same lens on the components of the personal computing era, the popular explosion of the internet and use these two movements to highlight the true meaning of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal statement “The Medium is the Message.”

At that point we’ll have brought ourselves up to the present, one in which our society is inextricably linked to technology. One in which technology shapes our actions and our thoughts. In the second section of the course we’ll explore these changing perspectives. In one class we’ll discuss the idea of property and ownership, the free licensing of works of music, prose or even science. Ownership will be addressed in the context of the music industry, with examples given in piracy and sampling, still prevalent even twenty years after the 2LiveCrew sampling lawsuit. Next we’ll address a relevant issue in a university setting: plagiarism. With hordes of information so freely at hand everywhere nowadays, and some of it our own personal data we’ll then explore privacy. Important questions will address the value of privacy, social networking, government information gathering, and the permanence of information on the internet. A loss of privacy must have an equal and opposite reaction and we’ll explore that reaction in the form of an increased value placed on authenticity. This authenticity will be discussed through one disingenuous (lonelygirl15) example and one honest movement (Cluetrain Manifesto) that’s tranforming how we do business and interact online. Oddly enough, in a later section we’ll see how this authenticity has resulted in the emergence of businesses with a “happiness” model built into their core missions.

The second half of the course will address ways in which our lives are now different as a result of technology. The first topic will be social networks, online and offline. We’ll discuss what your identity online means as a member of a community and how individuals are forming their own communities of practice formed around their own interests, guerilla knitting groups and hardware hackers and people who meet for things called barcamps that have nothing to do with drinking. We’ll talk about the music business and why there will probably never again be anyone as big as Michael Jackson but that’s ok because we’re all rock stars now. From pop stars we’ll move on to political stars, with Howard Dean as the first candidate to use the internet in his campaign and next the varied internet strategies employed by John McCain and Barack Obama. We’ll outline how Obama effectively used Long Tail for fundraising and organizing. Next we’ll look at how religion has fared in all of this, the varied views of technology from the world religions and new methods of worship.

If the previous sections seemed to shed a positive light on technology, the next section will address some of society’s concerns for technology’s negative connotations. Some critics are heralding our society as one that is being dumbed down, hopelessly dependent without understanding the basics of our technological slaves. By returning to the discussion of the wealth of freely available information we’ll examine how we learn and how we value information vs. hearsay. We’ll also briefly discuss AJ Keen’s book “Cult of the Amateur” where he decries the internet generation for it’s lack of respect for experts and open acceptance of faulty information. More concerns will be raised as we explore the life on the screen, including those who spend too much time separated from society using technology, violence in video games, cyberstalking and the media habits of the technologically addicted.

The final month of class will be spent addressing what’s coming next, in technology and our bodies interfacing with it. First we’ll have a discussion of the future of manufacturing and how you’ll be able to print anything you want just like on Star Trek. More Science Fiction topics will be addressed with discussion of cyborgs and artificial intelligence. We’ll play with some current examples of virtual and augmented reality and ask ourselves how this might further shift our perspectives and bend our lives. After talking about cyborgs, robots and artificial intelligence it’s only fitting that we close the semester discussing the resistance, what it looks like, and how you can join.

Society in the Information Age meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00pm to 2:20pm in Duncan Hall 1064 on Rice University’s campus. Any non-Rice community members wishing to sit in on the class may contact me.

What’s this course all about? Well, it’s a multi-disciplinary course addressing art conservation and engineering. That means that the students will be asked to critically examine art techniques as well as apply the decision based engineering design process. Taken from the course description:

The objective of this course is to apply the engineering design process to pressing problems in art conservation. One half of this course will focus on the history and practices of art conservation at modern museums.  The other half of this course will utilize the engineering design process by applying the art conservation knowledge to develop innovative storage solutions for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Each week, students will be briefed on a specific issue relating to the art conservation world, starting with the history of conservation leading up through modern times. Students will be given a unique and private insight to the inner workings of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, including behind-the-scenes access to their storage and conservation facilities. Museum officials will discuss the hidden portions of the museum and the day-to-day of the modern museum. Art storage experts will address the handling and storage of our cultural heritage. Students will learn the properties of materials used in art and the properties of materials used in its storage and preservation. Local conservators will guest lecture, providing unique perspectives on conservation principles in practice. A living artist will provide a perspective of their background, creative process and conservation concerns for their art. Finally, students will learn preventive conservation in long-term art ownership and cultural heritage disaster and damage preparation.

Each week’s art conservation topic corresponds with a step in the Engineering Design Process, a decision based system for developing new products or solutions. One case study will be presented per week that highlights the relationships between the art world and the engineering world. The art conservation lectures and the case study will provide the framework for a semester-long project where student teams will address their own unique conservation issue. Each team will select a piece from the MFAH’s private collection and then develop an innovative storage solution for that piece, culminating in a product design presented at the end of the semester. Through the engineering design process student teams will gain an understanding the problem in context, learn the current solutions, develop design criteria, brainstorm solutions and develop a product. In class activities that foster increased creativity and non-traditional thinking will help to arrive at unique solutions for the semester project.

Students will apply a digital workflow over the course of the semester, resting upon web 2.0 tools to transparently document and research the topic of conservation. Students will have their own blog where they will post recaps of the week’s information, progress reports for their semester long project and relevant information pertaining to art conservation.

Engineering for Art Conservation (ENGI/HUMA 240) meets Tuesdays and Thursdays on Rice University’s campus in room 119 of the Humanities building. If you would like to audit this course as a community member, information can be found on Rice University’s cashier’s website. To sit in on individual classes (syllabus will be posted shortly), please email me at mwettergreen@rice.edu.

Student activities will include class instruction, design work and preparation for an upcoming course. Students will collaborate with the instructor and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to develop custom archival solutions for priceless works from the museum’s permanent collection. Over the course of the internship a salon-style discussion series will run addressing unique facets of this design problem and multi-disciplinary approaches to civic issues, presented by members of the community. Students will additionally assist the instructor in the development of a course addressing civic engagement from a multi-disciplinary standpoint. Students will be taught engineering design approach, rapid prototyping, use of online collaboration and documentation methods. Student will have the opportunity to attend a summer course on entrepreneurship and will present the results of their summer internship in a professional forum.

Undergraduate students in any discipline or department are eligible and invited to apply. This is a full-time, 8 week summer program commencing in June providing a $4,000 stipend and put on by Rice’s School of Engineering in conjunction with Rice’s Center for Civic Engagement. Four positions are available.

For more information please contact the Instructor, Dr. Matthew Wettergreen (mwettergreen @ gmail.com). To apply for this internship, please email a resume, a brief personal statement and why this internship is of interest.

Individual
Bioengineering is at its essence a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving for biological issues. Those basic tenets have been applied as an individual in both my professional and creative life attempting at a well-rounded academic and cultural education. While at Rice University studying bioengineering for bone defect repair, aspects of architecture, clinical plastic surgery and industrial design were combined with more standard bioengineering aspects of mechanical engineering, materials research and imaging modalities. The incorporation of these fields resulted in novel designs and solutions supported by engaging and dynamic presentations and graphic design telling a story easy to understand for the lay person. Continued discussion with the architecture school resulted in students and professors incorporating the ideals of bioengineering into their architecture projects, including concepts of scaffold ingrowth, duality/singularity between host and body and symbiotic relationships between construct and program interaction. As an instructor, classes were run with equal parts teaching and learning, instructing the students on CAD methods and then employing the students to teach others to accomplish the tasks. Outside of graduate school, I applied this multidisciplinary approach to producing live events incorporating art, music, and film accessible to lovers of any art medium.

Caroline Collective
This multi-disciplinary education and approach to problem solving has been applied at Caroline Collective, founded in June 2008 with Ned Dodington. Taking the belief that being well rounded as an individual can be a platform for discussion and interaction with other similar like-minded people, Caroline Collective’s goal is to positively impact the cultural landscape of Houston. Our programming develops community-based education models and creates opportunities for individuals and groups to be more successful incorporating seemingly disparate disciplines of technology, music, film, arts and non-profits. We’ve demonstrated that each community has unique challenges but those challenges can be met with similar methods: listening to the needs of the members, incorporating equal parts teaching/learning and arriving at a solution incorporating all of the facets of the problem. Since October we have been running a monthly series called Bandcamp that is a community-focused teaching program to educate musicians on the path to success in their career. A similar community focused meeting, Artcamp, was held last month. In developing sustainable methods to address the art community’s challenges we collectively arrived at the decision to create a Houston Arts Wiki and to hold a day long Houston-wide art fair to introduce all of the resources and arts groups in Houston. We have recently launched a bi-weekly series of business classes with a partner startup, Werkadoo, that teaches independents in any discipline the skills they need to manage a successful independent career. Several companies are forming underneath the umbrella of Caroline Collective pooled from the complementary talents of the members and community groups that inhabit the space.

Community
This transparent and multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving on a community level is akin to the Long Tail effect online. People with niche interests meet to discuss commonalities and find that challenges and interests are parallel rather than perpendicular. Coworking is the physical manifestation of that and Caroline Collective one of many staging points for that interaction in Houston. In Houston you can witness technology focused individuals attending arts events and arts focused individuals attending technology focused events. Communities are experiencing greater engagement, richer relationships and more accessible resources, all due to the framework of a multi-disciplinary approach to solving collective problems. Opera in the Heights is exploring incorporating technology into its performances and digital archiving. Two new coworking spaces have opened based on Caroline Collective’s model, one in the Village focusing on green companies and one in Katy opened by the Houston Technology Center; another is slated to open in the Woodlands. The passive belief that all groups can contribute to and provide solutions to individuals’ problems and the active incorporation of those ideals has resulted in greater collaboration among community groups and greater insight to addressing community and societal challenges.