Next year’s WTBU executive board will receive university credit for their work at Boston University’s student radio station after College of Communication faculty members approved the idea unanimously Tuesday.
The vote – creating a two-credit COM course to be offered next fall – came during the college’s general faculty meeting and does not need approval from the provost, according to WTBU interim faculty advisor Nick Mills.
Next year’s course will only be open to students elected by the current WTBU e-board, Mills said, and will expand the current positions to include hours of station work, regular seminars, required reading and an eight-page term paper.
“The classroom work will be the seminars,” he said. “It will be very much like the BUTV station and AdLab programs which the university already has.”
Station General Manager Jennifer Coe said 19 members currently sit on the WTBU e-board, serving one-year terms. Applications for next year’s board were due Monday, before the faculty’s decision, and positions will be announced April 30.
Coe, a COM junior, is running for senior advisor next semester and said she did not know if the decision will increase faculty involvement at the station, but she stressed that the current e-board is fully qualified to choose which students will receive credit.
“We are working in a business atmosphere,” she said. “It’s not like we are voting on friends. We are all co-workers.”
Coe said about 23 students are running for positions next semester, approximately half of whom are current e-board members.
Mills proposed the program at the faculty meeting, but he said COM professor Anne Donohue, last year’s faculty advisor, will teach the course next fall.
Past proposals called for the class to be run by the Journalism Department, but Mills said the approved program will be a general COM course.
“The curriculum is much more widespread,” he said. “The subject matter goes beyond the Journalism Department even though the advisor is a journalism advisor.”
Tuesday’s decisions ended a long battle for the station that began in the early 1990s, Coe said.
“The administration has started to back us, started to recognize us,” she said. “I think that the station has progressed so much that we know this is not just a club.”
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