Fifteen years ago Loyola University communications instructor Craig Kois helped lead a groundbreaking effort to change WLUW, the school’s standard-issue music station, into community radio. As Kois explained the concept to the Reader in 1995: “We decided that somehow we should be serving the community that was receiving our signal. Our ultimate goal is to engage the community and train them to produce their own work. Students then become not reporters but facilitators.” If that sounds familiar, it might be because it’s been echoed recently in the rationale for Vocalo, Chicago Public Radio’s current experiment with its Indiana stations.
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Kois became WLUW’s manager in ’97, though he continued to teach part-time as well, and the station grew into a source for independent music and news and for programs targeted toward the various ethnic groups in its north-side broadcast area. In late 2001, when the university was struggling financially, Loyola announced that tuition money would no longer be used to support WLUW, exciting fears that the station’s mission might be lost. But Chicago Public Radio stepped in and took over the management, sharing financial responsibility with the university, which retained ownership. They were able to maintain the programming and staff, consisting of two full-time paid employees, Kois and program director Shawn Campbell, and a large contingent of volunteers. Kois and Campbell technically became WBEZ employees, and public fund-raising was stepped up.
Kois says he’s been told that the university stipulated his exit from the station. Campbell speculates that their community-organizing activities, undertaken when WLUW was threatened with extinction in 2002, could have made the school wary. But neither she nor Kois, who’s been teaching in Loyola’s communications department since the 1980s, has been given an explanation by the university. In the past, they say, interactions between the station and the school have been via WBEZ. What they know they’ve been told by WBEZ officials.
Last week Kois was taking comfort in the thought that Loyola would allow him to continue as a part-time instructor. And Pelissero told me Kois’s teaching assignment would be unaffected by events at the radio station. But last Friday Kois got a call from the chair of the communications department letting him know that he wouldn’t be teaching there in the fall.
