Universities Should Get Out of the Radio Business

Hardly anybody thinks better of themselves than journalists—their foremost competition being, perhaps, academics. The cacophony of self-congratulation reaches a peak in state-funded journalism; the fact of the venture’s unprofitability seems to testify to its virtue. When Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—the financier of the likes of NPR and PBS—in 2025, the kind of person who considers it nobler to rip money from the wallets of taxpayers than to get it by providing a valuable good or service was made livid. (Another kind of person will be unsurprised to learn that, with the defunding of CPB, the industry has self-adjusted and private donors, newly needed in the absence of federal funds, have contributed funds to save what they believe to be valuable journalism.)

Public media organizations have not, however, been severed completely from the state: according to a 2025 report from the University of Vermont, “50 percent of all public media organizations [NPR and/or PBS affiliates] are licensed to a college or university.” I must confess that I find the entanglement of press and state disquieting—in principle, categorically, in any form or degree, large or small. In this I consider myself a quintessential, inveterate American. 

That “[t]he liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state” was a premise written as self-evident into the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, a blueprint for American constitution-making, by John Adams. The essence of that liberty cannot but become alloyed, polluted, weakened by the public grain dole. The press and the government have distinct roles in the American Experiment. Copulation between the two—even minor bouts—produces a rash of institutional distraction, turning the thoughts of journalists from their journalism toward other, extrinsic concerns and interests. Force is one mechanism of state control; funding, a spoonful or more of sugar, is another.

The defenders of public media trot out a cavalcade of distressing consequences to ensue from the separation of university-licensed stations from their universities. Kerry Wilson, a public media executive, warns of “[c]ommunities los[ing] trusted local journalism, coverage of regional issues, and civic infrastructure that supports informed participation and public dialogue.” Granting, arguendo, Wilson’s fretting to be reasonable, I will not equivocate: I do not desire the decline of local journalism. But such a desire—to want something good or to want to avoid something bad—is no categorical imperative for state action. If it were, only ends would count in the drama of politics, and means would be immaterial. The world is not such a simple place. 

The location of public media at universities is curious; universities in the modern day often enjoy the license to undertake all manner of odd endeavors that do not further the education of their students. Public radio stations are, generally speaking, staffed by professionals, not students. A 2023 survey of such stations conducted by the University of Vermont—more than four-fifths of whose respondents were “licensed to or owned by a university or college”—discovered this: although “[m]ore than three quarters of public radio stations in the survey reported some level of student involvement…[m]ore than three quarters of current public radio-university involvement is limited to traditional internships.” 

The broadcast licenses of KUT Public Media, for instance, are held by the University of Texas at Austin, but KUT affords students few chances to do the work of broadcasting: some internships and “Way Left of the Dial,” a weekly hour hosted by student DJs, during which the patter of DJ Flatline, dj silkworm, DJ HIPPIESTANK, DJ Phast Phalanges, and their compatriots can be heard and enjoyed. Compare KUT to, for instance, Texas Student Media, “student-managed and student-produced,” which includes a newspaper, a music FM radio station, a humor publication, and more.

“I think we should be owned by other people”—that is a mantra for amicable separation. A few universities have followed this course, including the Universities of Missouri at St. Louis and Kansas City, which have worked to avoid disrupting programming during and after the multi-year process of decoupling. To institutions of higher learning, it offers revenues from the sale of a broadcast license and savings from funds no longer spent to subsidize public media; to stations, it offers genuine independence. After the University of Texas fired the general manager of KUT and KUTX earlier this year, donors began discussing a decoupling for the purpose of obtaining that very thing.

What, it might be asked, is a university for? Which amounts to the question of what a university is. An institution to educate and form citizens? A centralized hub of community services? Ought Zohran Mamdani to have established his chain of municipally operated grocery stores as an initiative of the City University of New York? At this late date, the affiliation of public stations and universities has, as Delta House had, a long tradition of existence. This, to the conservative, serves as a recommendation. Yet that tradition confronts an older tradition of American higher education, a tradition that has disintegrated in the last century and a half. To rediscover its lost institutional focus—in matters big and small—is the task of the contemporary, scatterbrained university.

David B. McGarry is the research director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.