An Open Letter To Father Stephen A. Privett, SJ

Dear Father Privett,

I wanted to offer you my sincere thanks for meeting with the community of KUSF students, volunteers, and listeners on Tuesday night. I'm sure it wasn't a particularly fun experience, but I appreciate your willingness to meet face to face and provide a shellshocked population with a little more background behind your decision to sell KUSF's license.

When I first moved to San Francisco in 1997, one of the first things I did as I drove into town was to turn my radio to the left to see what non-commercial, community-focused radio stations San Francisco had to offer. I soon fell in love with KUSF, became a volunteer, and eventually spent years as an on-air DJ at the station. I will never forget schlepping across town at 2:30am to earn my stripes as a young DJ on the 3 to 6am graveyard shift, fielding calls from students cramming for exams, taxi drivers, and insomniacs. As I was exposed to new music through KUSF's deep and extensive library, I prided myself on playing an eclectic and varied mix of music from all over the world, blending genres and themes together to bring music that literally could not be heard anywhere else to my fellow San Franciscans. I hosted musicians in Studio B from all over the world who rightly saw KUSF as a internationally reknowned, award winning beacon of culture and creativity. KUSF epitomized the very idea of the public owning the broadcast spectrum, a notion so easily forgotten amidst the crass commercialization and bland programming that occupies so much of the FM dial. Through its diversity of programming, KUSF was a mirror reflection of San Francisco, and it was beautiful.

But beyond the music and the cultural benefit to the City, what became most important to me over time was how KUSF fostered a community, both at USF and in San Francisco. I happened to be on the air on the morning of September 11, 2001, and was the first to inform many listeners of the terrible tragedy transpiring in New York. I became friends with students and volunteers whom I never would have met outside the station, hundreds of incredibly generous and loving people from all walks of life who coalesced around the lofty goal of celebrating and strengthening the culture of the Bay Area. And, most impactful for me, it was through KUSF that I met my wife, and we now are raising two young boys here in the Bay Area. Yes, KUSF was one incredibly diverse and unique community, and this spirit of community spilled out over the airwaves for 34 years, becoming an integral part of what makes San Francisco such a special place to live.

But, as you made clear on Tuesday night, any benefit that KUSF provided to the community was nice, but ultimately not all that important. Your primary responsibility is to the students, and in your judgement having this incredible one-of-a-kind resource broadcasting from Phelan Hall was not beneficial to the student population. After all, that space could be used for more dorms, and USF's primary reason for existence is not to run a radio station. Indeed, as you noted more than once, not all universities that teach medicine have hospitals on campus.

This brings us to that fateful day when the mysterious broker's Non-Disclosure Agreement landed on your desk. To hear you tell it Tuesday night, in your estimation the station was not beneficial to the University, but for years you did nothing about it nor took any serious action to change or improve the situation. Then one day you received a Non-Disclosure Agreement regarding the sale of the station and immediately signed it without question. When asked about this confounding series of events on Tuesday night, you repeatedly stated that you couldn't inform the students, volunteers, nor even your own teaching staff about the sale due to this infamous Non-Disclosure Agreement. Indeed, it was as if you were compelled to sign this document by some powerful outside force beyond your control.

However, you had a choice before you signed that document. You had an opportunity to show an ounce of respect to the students, volunteers, and the City of San Francisco by providing the community with a chance to acquire the station's license. What's more, you had a chance every day for years before you received the offer to take action and meet with the leadership of KUSF to either transform the station into something that you felt would more directly benefit the students or explore options for selling the license and moving the station off campus.

And here is where your hospital analogy is particularly apt -- if USF did have a hospital on campus that was staffed by students and volunteers and served the most needy population of San Francisco, and you received an offer from an LA-based developer to convert that hospital into a parking lot, what would be your first instinct? Would you consider finding a way to allow the hospital to operate independently and remove the financial burden it may have posed on the University, or would you take the first offer you received, sign an NDA, and conduct the whole sale in complete secrecy? Would you intentionally disseminate disinformation to the students and volunteers that the hospital was simply going to be moved to a new location, and in a surprise move have campus police escort the patients and volunteers out into the streets and change the locks?

I don't think you would. And what this tells me is that you, and by extension the Board of Trustees, didn't actually understand the true value of what you had. That you would accept the first offer, turn your back on the students and volunteers who ran the station, and sell this precious public resource off to an LA-based entity tells me that you must have seen the sale of KUSF merely as an easy way out of an inconvenient situation rather than the betrayal of your community and irreparable destruction of a cultural and civic icon that this action truly was. It was a terrible decision for your students, for San Francisco, and one that will ultimately come back to haunt you and the University.

In closing, I wanted to thank you again for hosting the meeting on Tuesday night. Radio can be an impersonal medium in that one never really knows exactly who or how many people are listening. I hadn't been particularly active at KUSF in the last few years due to the time consuming nature of raising children. But seeing Presentation Hall overflowing with people just one day after the transmitter was unceremoniously turned off truly inspired me and reminded me of why I love KUSF, why I love San Francisco, and why I will do everything in my power to stop the sale from being approved.

Sincerely,

Noel Morrison