 "Photo: Isabel Slepoy")
The College of Communication is ready to remove some of its past this weekend as workers prepare to take down the more than 50-year-old radio tower atop its roof.
It speaks of old technology,” COM Dean Tom Fiedler said. “It hasn’t been used in 30 years. I think it sends the wrong message of where we want to go as a college. In 2008, radio is old, the technology of our grandfathers.”
Fiedler said the decision to remove of the tower had been in the works for a while, but was officially made just a few days ago. Fliers around COM ask students and faculty what they would like to see in place of the tower.
Journalism professor Anne Donohue, the academic director for the student-run radio station WTBU, said she thinks the radio tower is antiquated.
“It’s an artifact of a bygone era,” she said. “We don’t use it for distributing any audio. It’s never worked for the radio station, and it’s never been a very pretty thing to look at it. It’s ugly.”
The radio tower was originally for WBUR, which was broadcast from the top floor of COM in the late 1950s, according to bostonradio.org. WBUR is now broadcast from 890 Commonwealth Ave.
WTBU began webcasting in 2000 and, before that, used carrier current, which broadcasts radio using the cables that go up and down elevator shafts, Donohue said.
WTBU Music Director Jen Brown said she was disappointed to find that the station did not actually have its own signal on campus. She said the radio tower was “deceptive.”
“It represents absolutely nothing,” Brown, a COM junior, said. “It’s a huge useless tower of metal.
“COM needs to push more for an Internet station, giving us a visible spot in the front of the COM building, with a big window where people can see us broadcasting,” she said.
Donohue said she, too, wants a “prominent, storefront window,” but would like for an entirely new COM building to go along with it.
“If we’re not building a new building, at least get the website for the radio station out in the front of the building,” she said.
Fiedler said he wants to get a sign stating, “COM,” to replace the tower for the time being, but hopes to get a Jumbotron in the future, following the example set by schools like the Beijing Film Academy.
The tower’s removal does not interfere with President Robert Brown’s construction freeze, because workers will not actually be building anything, Fiedler said.
“I want to take COM into the future,” he said. “I’m conscious more about where we are in this continuum of communication in general, changing and being transformed. We always want to be leaning forward.”
20 comments