This website grows out of research done by students active in Brown University's two radio stations, WBRU and BSR. The students wanted to understand more about how Brown came to have two such different stations, beginning in 1936 for WBRU and 1995 for BSR. Here you'll find documents, oral histories, photographs, and sound files that begin to tell those stories. And we seek donations to the collection. Throughout the site we ask you to contribute your own memories.
Students are cued to begin a broadcast in the WBRU studio, 1947.
As we conducted the research and analysis, we came to see college radio as important beyond our particular campus. Because Brown radio developed in a unique way, with two stations juggling competing goals and activities in two different ways, it is particularly interesting. Radio has always been one of the most flexible of media, reinventing itself as technologies and economic structures changed. College radio exhibits the ultimate in flexibility and WBRU and BSR continue to experiment with new ways of delivering radio. Is there a model in college radio for the complexities that media, especially radio, face in the future?
Susan Smulyan
Associate Professor
Department of American Civilization