ICC Cuts Ties With Radio Station
By Justin Brown, Harbinger
Friday, Sept. 11, 2015
Illinois Central College cut ties with 90.7 FM WAZU radio effective at end of September due to lack of state funds and decreased student enrollment.
According to interim president William Tammone, ICC was impacted by a decrease of $900,000 in state funding, as well as a loss in generated revenue, which is mainly due to a 4 percent drop in enrollment. This has forced the college to find solutions to the budgetary shortcomings.
“Whenever we make cuts we try to minimize any negative impact on student learning and so actually this cut, although quite big (over $120-130,000), had minimal impact on student learning and that was one of the reasons that we decided to go ahead and make this change,” Tammone said. “So we’re always trying to streamline operations and operate as effectively as possible, we want to minimize any negative impact on student learning and opportunities for our programs.”
ICC was projected to spend $122,926 for the radio station in fiscal year 2015. These funds were used to cover salaries, leasing and part-time staff, including student workers. The student workers will be placed elsewhere within ICC, and the lone internship will be conducted elsewhere within the Peoria area.
Beyond the student workers and internship, ICC students and faculty had little involvement with the station itself, Tammone said. In fact the station consisted of no student programming and only two professors: Jim Sullivan and Larry Harms hosted shows. Sullivan hosted a poetry related show and Harms hosted a show relating to Jazz music.
WAZU operated with two sites; one on the North Campus in Peoria, and the other on the East Peoria campus, but ICC did not own the license for the station.
“We had multiple challenges with this relationship, which started in late 2009,” Tammone said. “They stemmed from the fact that we did not own the license for the radio station. We were just partnering with somebody that owned the license, and because we did not own the license, we did not have control over the programming and we were not able to really utilize the station for advertising and promotion purposes.”
“I think we would want to have greater control over the programming and be able to utilize the station for our own promotional purposes,” Tammone said. “It’s not a commercial station [so] we couldn’t sell commercial time, we couldn’t even broadcast ICC commercials, we could only share public announcements or events.”
“The value of it would be in proportion to our level of control over it and our level of having opportunities to promote the Illinois Central College and its programs.”
Since October of 2010, English Professor Jim Sullivan has hosted a show titled, Poets’ Voices. “I would have conversations with writers in, near, and passing through Peoria and Central Illinois. I talked with poets, fiction writers, essayists, children’s-book writers, editors, teachers, scholars, librarians and one bookseller—anybody with an involvement in literature or a take on a literary topic,” said Sullivan.
Sullivan said some friends had encouraged him to continue the project as a podcast. ”But I’m not sure I will,” the radio show host said. “Having the institutional prestige (such as it is) of doing the show for a radio station, I think made it easy for me to introduce myself to people and explain why I was doing this. I think I’ll just say the show has run its course, lived a good healthy life that is now coming to an end.”