WMBC Newsletter - Spring 2023 #1
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Where We've Been
We would like to apologize up front to all of our listeners and community for the lack of communication over the last semester. This undertaking has been much more intensive than we anticipated, and the pushback from campus administration far harsher (see below). We are all full-time students here at the WMBC Board, so spare time to schedule meetings with campus administrators is fairly sparse.
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What's Been Happening
First, WMBC has been hard at work at our spring Music Festival! Hosted in collaboration with Retriever Music Society, this free five-hour extravaganza will feature 7 local bands at the University Center Ballroom. If you haven't already, grab your FREE tickets from the link below! You can also see a preview of the bands that will be performing on our Instagram!
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Second, WMBC recently received some very bad news. On January 22nd, we were informed that WMBC would not be allowed to return to our studio space in the University Center. Though we called it home for more than 35 years, that era may be coming to an end. We are all saddened and angered by this news. One of the only reasons given for this decision was the belief, in the Student Affairs department's eyes, that our needs could be met by practice rooms in the Music department and the Library. We reached out to these groups to find out that neither department had been consulted by Student Affairs prior to the decision. As such, they could not accommodate us.
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Where does this leave us?
Functionally, we are now homeless. Our equipment, music library, and anything else to the station's name is now locked, out of our ability to access it. The solutions proposed by Student Affairs are complete non-starters, and we specifically called this out in our five-year plan presentation meetings back in September and October. Rather than take away our point regarding the space, however, it appears Student Affairs simply heard us mention the Music department's recording rooms (which are not available to non-music majors) and the Library's Digital Media Lab (which is not large enough or accessible enough for the station) and assumed we could make this work. Obviously, they are mistaken - both for assuming we could make use of something we explicitly said we could not, and for assuming they could make this decision without pushback from the station and its supporters.
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We Need Your Help!
Fighting for the station as the board has proved unsuccessful. Campus administration has repeatedly ignored our pleas, presentations, plans, and arguments for the station. We have mentioned the hundreds of station members we have that are eager to both share their voice and listen to the student voice - this has not changed their minds. Perhaps now it is time that they heard from the student voice, regarding the silencing of it. Juggling this news with planning the music festival, we are rolling out phase 1 of our response & protest. We will not take this decision lying down and will always fight for the student voice to be heard. We are beginning an email campaign to the President, Student Affairs, and Campus Life offices that we need your support with. We have details linked in the Google doc below. We are asking all of our station members: student, faculty, staff, or alumni, to reach out to the email addresses listed below. We have included a sample email, but please edit it as you would like.
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Please consider sending multiple emails to these addresses, we believe it is through volume that we will be noticed.
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What's Next
Despite this frankly devastating news, we will continue to operate at whatever capacity we can. WMBC was previously given the green-light to begin hosting podcasted content, which we are almost complete with preparations for! We plan to send out information to selected shows in no more than a week. Flexibility with our podcasted shows are much higher than our traditional live ones, as there is no time constraint to podcasts! We continue to accept podcast show proposals at the form below.
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We also continue to prepare our protest/pressure campaign. The email campaign is only one of our planned actions, however we hope that further actions aren't necessary. We greatly appreciate your participation with this campaign and we are dedicated to keeping you updated in the future. We hope that you will stick with us as we fight for the student voice's survival at UMBC.
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Weekly Meetings
We realize that our communication has been lackluster over the previous semester. We are committed to fixing this in several ways, one of which includes the starting of weekly drop-in sessions with the WMBC Management team. These won't be full GBMs, but more work sessions that any member can come, ask questions to us, or see what we're doing. We will be primarily focused on station projects during this time, and we want to include member input on our path forward.
These meetings will be taking place each Tuesday in ILSB 302 from 7:30PM-9:30PM. Meetings will start on February 14th and continue throughout the semester. Please come by if you'd like to talk with us about anything!
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Find all of our socials at the buttons below!
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