KECC, our campus radio station has been one of the classes that has been affected due to the cutbacks it was removed and made to provide more space for the bookstore.
Professor Douglas Marston, KECC adviser, said the station will be shut down this semester and will be shut down next semester as well.
Little importance is being given to this situation and the college should look for solutions to relocate, reorganize and rebuild the radio station rather than shutting it down. The few who were involved have loss the one outlet on campus they enjoyed. In fact, relocating the station inside the new Humanities Building would be perfect. The college should make the radio a part of the journalism department because, after all, the radio play a big role in the mass media as much as the newspaper and the Web.
The journalism department brings a lot of notoriety to the school and making KECC a part of the department would not only help the program grow, but it would give more students an opportunity to participate in an extracurricular activity like the radio.
Many students did not even know that there was a radio station on campus until it got canceled and those students were suddenly interested in the idea of participating in the club before it was canceled.
It just goes to show that KECC did not have enough funds to be able to have a permanent location seeing how it has been moved from the Student Services Center to the Student Activities Center and now the move doesn’t matter since it has gone completely off air
There are also not enough funds to provide a better wattage frequency as KECC could only be heard in certain areas around the campus mostly near the library lawn but if KECC could become part of the journalism curriculum, EC could allocate funds from the advertising the department makes and the journalism department budget to at least help KECC begin the steps to rebuild.
It would be a shame to lose something so essential to mass media, communication and more importantly something students are actually interested in doing.