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