Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

Town and Gown

I cut the stone for this building… I was damn proud of my work. And the buildings went up. When they were finished, the damnedest thing happened. It was like the buildings were too good for us. Nobody told us that. It just felt uncomfortable, that’s all. Even now, I’d like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone, but I just feel out of place… so, all you got to show for my twenty years of work is the holes we left behind.

—Paul Dooley as Ray Stohler, Breaking Away (1979)

Likely the best-known media depiction of Bloomington, Indiana is Peter Yates’ coming-of-age film Breaking Away. The story centers around a group of young, white, working-class Bloomington residents (called “cutters” for their families’ involvement with the regional limestone industry) and their ongoing conflicts with groups of relatively upper-class Indiana University students. Class is portrayed as a clear dividing line and source of irreconcilable strife between these two groups throughout the film. Near the end of the movie, as protagonist Dave Stohler anticipates riding as a member of the cutters’ team in the upcoming Little 500 bicycle race (a real annual event in Bloomington), he and his father Ray walk through the IU campus, past its Main Library. Ray, a career stonecutter, indirectly encourages his son to consider attending college instead of following in his footsteps, explaining his experience as a blue-collar worker in a university town through the quote at the beginning of this section. This scene is key to the film’s primary narrative of Bloomington and other U.S. college towns; namely, that they are places in which residents are divided by class and background into two groups: those who are affiliated with the college/university in question and those who are not, an imagined dichotomy sometimes rendered as “town and gown.”

Media portrayals of this division, Breaking Away among them, often depict the town and gown dynamic as contentious and binaristic, with progressive or elitist scholars pitted against townies with deep blue-collar roots and more conservative values when faced with local changes. This is a problematic oversimplification. In my time in Bloomington, I’ve met few, if any, people who subscribe fully to the idea of such a hardline separation. Even so, the spatial and social dynamics of a college town tend to assume and even promote such a division. College campuses are built to be all-encompassing, serving every aspect of student life. Longtime Bloomington city council representative and WFHB volunteer Stephen Volan, whose master’s thesis for the IU geography program focuses on Bloomington, makes a strong case for U.S. college town geographies as largely based on architectural philosophies of paternalism. He has referred to the college town as “a parody of a city” in which the campus attempts to duplicate the functions of whole cities while usurping civil authority (e.g., through campus law enforcement) and rejecting entities seen as aberrant, such as unhoused populations (2023). U.S. campuses, argues Volan, have in general been built for easy oversight of students, to surveil them not only as they study but as they live, privately and publicly. They are meant to control students; as Volan said on an episode of WFHB’s Interchange, “we don’t just talk about universities as organizations, we talk about them as places that are self-contained” (Storm 2021). Volan traces the history of the college campus to a Puritanical belief in the purity of the rural versus the sinfulness of the urban. Contemporary U.S. college towns are not inherently rural, per se. They are, though, often characterized by relative disconnect from other major metropolitan areas. Shuttles from Bloomington to the nearest commercial airport, located about an hour’s drive away in Indianapolis, cost $33 and run only once every one to two hours each day during their active window. It is impossible to take the shuttle in time to catch some of the earliest and latest flights of the day. The distance between Indianapolis and Bloomington makes private ridesharing transportation prohibitively expensive. Individuals who cannot or do not drive (like me) are thus extremely limited in terms of mobility. Many college towns have even fewer options for public transportation to other municipalities. As per Volan’s history, such limitations were often part of early campus planning, the disconnection meant to keep students from venturing off into urban influences that administrations cannot directly monitor and control. In other words, as was once told to the WIUS broadcasters, students shouldn’t be talking to townspeople.

Contemporary Bloomington is not what most people describe as rural. It is the largest municipality in its county, and the seventh-largest city in the state of Indiana. Media scholar Kevin Howley, whose chapter on WFHB draws on volunteer participation and ethnographic work at the station from 1993 to 1997—its first four years on the air—paints a vivid picture of Bloomington’s perhaps cosmopolitan qualities:

Described by residents and visitors alike as an ‘oasis’ from the rest of the state’s political and cultural conservatism, Bloomington’s character is at once cohesive and fragmented, rural and urban, traditional and postmodern, local and global. These competing, yet oddly complementary qualities have forged a rather dynamic local culture—a culture that is reflected, celebrated, shaped, and shared over the airwaves of community radio for Bloomington, Indiana, WFHB. (2005, 91)

Figure 1.2 shows a county-by-county electoral map of Indiana from the 2024 presidential elections that makes clear some distinctions between Bloomington and other parts of the state:

Figure 1.2: 2024 United States presidential election results in Indiana by county. In counties colored red, a majority of voters voted for GOP candidate Donald Trump, while in counties colored blue, a majority of voters voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris; darker shades indicate a stronger majority. Arrow points to Monroe County, one of the four counties in Indiana to vote for Kamala Harris. Bloomington is the largest city and county seat of Monroe County. Map created and dedicated to the public domain by Wikimedia Commons user ZackCarns: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indiana_Presidential_Election_Results_2024.svg.

In conducting my fieldwork interviews, I routinely asked my fellow WFHB participants for their thoughts on the nature of WFHB’s relationship to Bloomington. Opinions varied widely, especially on the relationship between the station and the university. Figure 1.3 shows the spatial proximity of the university’s main campus to WFHB’s downtown facilities.

Figure 1.3: Indiana University’s campus and WFHB’s downtown facilities. Map created in uMap. Interactive version at companion webpage.

One programmer insisted to me that “FHB built itself… IU, like most of the universities, tends to be trying to build its own community that’s separate from the community. They pay lip service to joining the community. But they’re the state cosplaying as the local” (Interview 28). When I brought up the contributions of popular IU Chancellor Herman B Wells, who provided much of the initial startup capital that funded the station and lent a gong from his personal collection to serve as the first sound ever officially broadcast by WFHB, this same programmer clarified, “Herman was just that kind of guy… In fact, I don’t think the university had anything to do with it at all.” Herman’s money may have come from his work with IU, at least in large part, but it wasn’t IU-the-corporation that gave the station that money, it was Herman-the-person.

Most people I talked to agreed that the university impacts the WFHB community behind the scenes and on the listening end. Some noted the transience of the IU population as a concern, theorizing that it must be difficult for a station like WFHB, which exists to serve local needs and audiences, to cultivate an audience when people do not feel attached to or invested in the broadcast area. Others pointed out that IU brings in a larger and more varied potential audience than a small community station would have elsewhere in Indiana, and that the presence of the school’s well-regarded music and music-related programs suggests more artistically inclined residents in the area in general. There are and have been faculty, staff, and students from IU who participate in WFHB programming as an alternative to music- or media-related duties in their capacities as university attendees or employees. In WFHB’s early days, the graduate student-run Ethnomusicology Student Association used to have its own show on the weekly schedule; the show has since been merged with others in the “international music” show Planetary Caravan, which I discuss in chapter two. Many students in my home department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology have also hosted and/or produced other programs on the WFHB schedule.

University-affiliated individuals cannot be treated as totally separate from it, but they cannot be conflated with it, either. The university operates from the top down, the potentials of which have become very clear in the last few years in which high level institution officials have been able to make overwhelmingly unpopular choices and implement limitations on free expression. In 2024, Indiana University faculty held a vote on no-confidence resolutions for several members of the IU administration including the university’s president Pamela Whitten, citing several specific incidents including the following, listed in national publication Forbes:

• Cancelling an art exhibit at IU’s Eskenazi Museum of Art by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby over concerns about the artist’s pro-Palestinian social media posts regarding the Israel-Gaza war;

• Suspending political science faculty member Abdulkader Sinno for misrepresenting a Palestine Solidarity Committee event on a room reservation form and for conducting the event without university authorization;

• Attempting to spin off the Kinsey Institute from IU, a move that was ultimately not pursued;

• Refusing to publicly support IU faculty member Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an obstetrician-gynecologist who had provided an abortion for a ten-year old rape victim and was then the target of inflammatory comments by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita;

• Disregarding a 2022 faculty vote in support of unionization efforts by graduate student workers; and

• The administration failing to “proactively and effectively stand against the Indiana legislature's violations of academic freedom and faculty protections.” (Nietzel 2024)

These incidents and the larger patterns of paternalism and authoritarianism they represent led to voting outcomes overwhelmingly in favor of the no-confidence resolutions: 93.1% of participating faculty voted no confidence in the university president, 91.5% in the provost, and 75% in the vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. Over the next year, the university president received over $400,000 in bonuses from the university Board of Trustees and a salary increase of $200,000 (Perlich 2024, Huang and Rosenzweig 2024, Rosenzweig 2025). As these raises and bonuses were doled out to the highest levels of administration, other parts of campus experienced drastic cuts, including the student newspaper, which was told that its weekly print edition—in circulation around not just campus but all of Bloomington for 157 years—would have to be cut in the name of making the department “revenue neutral.” Staffers of the Indiana Daily Student did not hold back in expressing their outrage. On October 10, 2024, two days after the announcement, the headline “The IDS has NO CONFIDENCE in the Media School’s plan for student media” was emblazoned over a partial image of the paper’s very first front page, printed in 1807. “It is clear,” wrote editors Jacob Spudich and Marissa Meador, “that the IU administration refuses to make any substantive funding a possibility. But we find the lack of communication and transparency insulting to our professional and student staffers.” These rapid shifts in power and funding continued in the summer of 2025 at even higher levels of authority as Indiana governor Mike Braun’s changes to statewide education budgets led to sweeping cuts and consolidations of programs at public universities across the state. Across Indiana, over 400 programs were slated for elimination or merging (Gooding 2025). That fall, a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression based on student surveys and institutional policies ranked Indiana University the worst public college in the country for free speech (Charron 2025). In a college town, in which a university typically holds a tremendous amount of direct and indirect social, cultural, and economic capital, changes at the levels of university legislation and administration impact both town and gown. Davarian L. Baldwin writes that secondary schools today “have become the dominant employers, real estate holders, health-care providers, and even policing agents in major cities across the country” (2021, 15). Few spheres of a town like Bloomington, if any, are truly untouched when institutional policies and regimes of value shift so drastically.

Grassroots organizations like WFHB are not immune to these shifts, but they exist in the hopes of providing an organization more structured by the wants and needs of all the people who participate. In terms of funding and programming decisions, WFHB is independent from Indiana University, giving it a considerable amount of freedom to critique the complex systems of which it is a part. Granted, this independence leaves it more fully exposed to the impacts of socioeconomic sea changes than it might be if it were to be affiliated with and supported by an institution like the university. As the cuts to university programming and media show, though, being part of the university is no guarantee of safety. Two stories from my fieldwork in 2024 illustrate the vulnerability and the resilience afforded by WFHB’s literal and figurative ‘lightning rod’ status and are worth understanding in the context of the college town, Indiana University’s focus on increasing revenue, and media capitalism that make up the social-spatial system in which WFHB operates. The first deals with the impacts of a literal lightning strike, while the second explores a figurative storm by way of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.