According to Jewell, the status college radio attained in that era was largely an accident — a strange, unexpected confluence of progressive New Deal-era public policy and a subsequent neoliberal shift in broadcast regulations that ended up backfiring on its corporate proponents.
“The noncommercial identity of college radio is shaped by this idea of ‘educational radio,’ which was developed by reformers from the 1930s who were trying to carve out a space for content that wouldn’t have a broad, commercial appeal,” said Jewell. “Their hope was to use radio to knit communities together and speak to the nation’s cultural pluralism.”
But in the 1970s, a conflict arose between professional public radio and the more amateurish college radio, whose tiny, 10-watt transmitters often clashed with the signals of larger, more polished NPR affiliates in their broadcast areas. In 1978, lobbying from those bigger stations led the FCC to eliminate the Class D licenses that many small college stations relied on in an attempt to push them off the air and free up broadcast bandwidth.
“Ironically, a lot of those small, 10-watt stations actually upgraded their signals” in order to keep broadcasting, Jewell said. “Suddenly, these stations that were invested in cultural exploration and speaking for communities that weren’t being served by commercial radio become more visible. And eventually, the music industry started to incorporate those signals into their business model.”
This increased visibility happened to coincide with the emergence of the punk, post-punk and new wave, largely youth-driven genres that espoused a countercultural ethos. As a result, college radio stations like MIT’s WMBR, Emerson College’s WERS and Boston College’s WZBC became a way for offbeat artists and independent record labels, who struggled to find a home in the mainstream, to reach a wider (though not necessarily a mass) audience. “The policy changes created the space for this artistic movement to gain purchase on the airwaves,” said Jewell.
While histories of American punk rock rightly center New York City as its birthplace, Jewell makes the case that it was Boston college radio that helped nurture it into the cultural force it became. “The key place is MIT’s radio station, which had a lot of community DJs who were connected to the punk underground,” says Jewell. “And they claim the status of having the first punk rock radio show. They were really embedded in that scene and were committed to bringing that music onto the airwaves.” Boston’s status as a major college town meant that these DJs could reach students and young people who’d come to the city from all over the country and very likely would bring this new music back to their local scenes, where it may otherwise have gone unheard.