An 2000 article in the Argus about WESU’s free-form programming. (Special Collections & Archives)
After 72 years broadcasting from Clark Hall, renovation of the dormitory forced WESU to move to new quarters, half the size of its previous facilities, in its present location on the second floor of the Wesleyan bookstore building at the corner of Broad and Williams Streets. The move was traumatic, and in the process, some of the decades of accumulated equipment, documents, records and recordings, and other historical items were lost. (Special Collections & Archives)
2000-2001 WESU board of directors, from the 2001 Olla Podrida
After the sudden Clark Hall move in 2001, WESU faced another turning point in 2004 when President Douglas Bennet proposed that the station become an NPR affiliate.
An Argus cartoonist editorialized against President Bennet’s NPR proposal.
President Bennet’s proposal was even covered in The New York Times. After several weeks of uncertainty, WESU began a simulcast of WSHU’s NPR weekday and Saturday morning programming in spring 2005. Another outcome of the NPR controversy was the hiring of Benjamin Michael, a community volunteer (in foreground), as the full-time general manager. (Special Collections & Archives)
On her radio program Indigenous Politics, which aired on WESU 2007-2013, Wesleyan Professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui talked candidly and engagingly about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist, bringing Indigenous activism to the mainstream. She published thirty of her conversations in her 2019 book, “Speaking of Indigenous Politics:
Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders.”
Two-time Peabody Award-winning producer Doug Berman ’84 is responsible for NPR’s most successful entertainment programs, the hit comedies Car Talk and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!. He provided this reflection on WESU in 2008.
