I have felt the heat./wutk

Scary is wrong. I refer you to the following excerpt from an article published in Metro Pulse about two months ago by that prize-winning media reporter Joe Tarr:

"[Chad] Harriss says Maestro will allow the station [WUTK] to be more like its commercial counterparts, and thus better train students for broadcasting jobs. "What we are is a laboratory. Our primary goal is to train broadcast students in a realistic environment," he says.
However, according the Federal Communications Commission, college stations aren't licensed to be training grounds for commercial radio �they're licensed to provide educational and alternative programming for the communities they broadcast in.
"[Training DJs] can be done by any commercial station," says Allen Meyers, a communications analyst with the FCC. "That's not to say it isn't an important function, but it cannot be something you hang your hat on as a non-profit educational station."

Now, they've still got their specialty shows, and they may be able to count some of those as "educational and alternative" depending on which ones they choose to air. And it's true that some (but not all, or even most) of the artists they play are not played on any other stations in Knoxville, which I suppose qualifies as "alternative." But it's a spirit vs. letter of the law question. And besides, outside just the FCC license, why NOT make WUTK an interesting, weird, funny, hallucinatory, subversive, transgressive, confusing, bewildering experience? Whatever happened to college kids? Are they all so burned out on cheap beer and ecstasy by the time they turn 18 that they no longer have the ability or even the desire to think outside the narrow little niches that get prescribed to them? Do they all really just want to be the next "Kim'n'Tim in the morning?" Sigh. I like some of the music on the not-so-new, not-so-hot Torch; I heard the Beta Band today. But Jesus, I heard the Beta Band on the soundtrack to a damn Hollywood movie with John Cusack (a decent Hollywood movie, but still...) C'mon fellas. Surprise me. Please?