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Tag: Cleveland State

  • WCSB Sues Cleveland State, Alleging it Had ‘Secret Plan’ To Shut Station Down – Cleveland Scene

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    Monday morning, supporters and ex-DJs of the axed college radio station WCSB filed a lawsuit against their former host, Cleveland State University, in county court.

    In a 14-page complaint filed in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, WCSB DJs claim that CSU President Laura Bloomberg covertly schemed to quiet the station’s criticism by transferring the antenna to Ideastream.

    And then, they allege, making it seem like a win-win situation: Ideastream gets a new terrestrial signal; CSU students get a swath of new internship opportunities.

    Bloomberg “grew weary of the independent voices at WCSB, their nonconformist attitudes, their complaints about university operations and their protests against university policy,” the court document reads.

    “At some unknown point as those protests were ramping up,” it states, CSU “began secret deliberations and discussions to sandbag WCSB with a plan to shut it down.”

    The suit comes roughly three months after Bloomberg announced, on October 3, that WCSB’s offices off Chester Ave. would be vacated, after nearly five decades of broadcasting. And three months after former station manager Alison Bomgardner, who is one of the plaintiffs, was barred from the studio.

    Well-attended protests, like the one that took place outside the City Club in mid-October, followed. Former DJs banded together around XCSB, a guerrilla recreation of the station — vowing to keep its programming alive, be it online or at weekly shows at the Happy Dog in Gordan Square.

    But Monday’s filing marks the first serious legal involvement between the two entities. Bomgardner and crew are asking not only for transparency surrounding Bloomberg’s so-called plan—via the release of public records—but also for CSU to “invalidate” the operating agreement between them and Ideastream. (And return it to WCBS DJs.)

    Their claim is that Bloomberg and Cleveland State knowingly violated civil rights law when it held supposed private talks, with and without Ideastream, to figure out how it could do away with WCSB. A “discriminatory” practice, the suit alleges, that targeted WCSB DJs “because of the content of their speech.”

    If the suit progresses, Cleveland State could reach an agreement, or proceed to a trial by jury later this year or in 2027. Both CSU and Bomgardner refused to comment at length to Scene about the case.

    If the DJs are successful, its possible that the thousands of items still locked on the fourth floor of the Campus International building—from Hungarian records to vintage comic books—would be returned to the students and volunteers that once had access to them.

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Former WCSB DJs Get a Showcase at Happy Dog Every Friday in November After Station Shutdown – Cleveland Scene

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    Cleveland State University’s decision to shut down its college radio station, WCSB, and hand over management of the frequency to Ideastream for 24/7 jazz programming has miffed many Clevelanders. It’s prompted sidewalk protests, voracious social media criticism, conference speeches, petition drives and even a City Council resolution shaming the university for its choice.

    And it’s definitely riled up Sean Watterson.

    Watterson, the owner of the Happy Dog in Gordon Square, decided to create a temporary home for WCSB’s DJs—now residing under the nom de guerre of XCSB—who were locked out of the studio on October 3. He created a weekly series called “Save College Radio,” meant to act as a showcase for voices and music unheard elsewhere on local airwaves.

    “The obliteration of WCSB is a blow to the local music ecosystem,” Watterson told Scene in a text message. Their “DJs featured local developing artists, and promoted these artists’ shows at local independent venues.”

    “We wanted to give the XCSB DJs an opportunity to stay connected with their audiences,” he added, “and keep the issue in the spotlight until some kind of solution can be reached that ensures the students and community have a platform to continue the essential role they’ve played in our community for the last 50 years.”

    A handful of DJs, from those playing German traditional to 2000s Hip Hop, will play sets from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. every Friday in November. All sets will be free and open to the public.

    Save College Radio’s full schedule for the month is pending. Its lineup for November 7 is as follows:

    • 5:30 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.: Beth C, from Friday Rock Rotation
    • 6:15 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.: Jackie The Dogwolf, from Hours of The Dogwolf
    • 7 p.m. to 7:45 p.m.: Into The Void, of Insanity
    • 7:45 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.: Adam, from 666 oz. of Madness

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Cleveland State University Kills WCSB, Transfers License to Ideastream to Broadcast Smooth Jazz – Cleveland Scene

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    Over the past 49 years, students at Cleveland State have broadcasted a wide range of opinions and genres over the waves at WCSB, a stalwart of college radio in Northeast Ohio.

    That plethora of sound was what followers called “freeform alternative,” a kind of anything-goes, from blues to indie to punk to K-pop and grindcore. And world music. And syndicated opinions on public affairs.

    Now, as of Friday morning, WCSB will no longer host its student DJs, help diversify the offerings of FM radio in Cleveland, or act as a symbol for the university’s curious and the colorful.

    As of October 3, the station is now just jazz.

    Or, more specifically, WCSB is now being managed and programmed by Ideastream, the result of a new operating agreement between the local NPR affiliate and Cleveland State. Simply put, WCSB is simulcasting JazzNEO, Ideasteam’s station for all things jazz, on 89.3 FM. WCSB as we’ve known it for nearly 50 years doesn’t exist anymore.

    To add salt to the wound, though the negotiations between the two sides were ongoing for months, the switch was flipped and WCSB put out to pasture on National College Radio Day. A fact neither side was either aware of or gave a shit about.

    Both parties framed the rebranding as a win-win opportunity though: Ideastream gets a new analog radio home for its flagship jazz programs; CSU finds a new avenue—like its School of Film & Media Arts—for students itching for broadcast internships and “paid-for” opportunities.

    Students and former staff members didn’t see it that way, however.

    “Honestly? We’re grieving right now as a station,” Alison Bomgardner, 21, WCSB’s general manager up until Friday, told Scene in a call.

    “I think this is all a pivot from the university to go away from community-based opportunities to pre-professional opportunities,” she added. “And I do not think that’s a good thing.”

    Bomgardner, a senior international relations major known as DJ Squirrel behind the mic, sounded forlorn as she relayed her version of WCSB’s abrupt closure: no more, Bomgardner said, does CSU have a relaxed outlet for WCSB’s 120 members, its handful of DJs, and a music stop “for those who didn’t want to hear stuff on Hot 100 radio.”

    It’s no secret that CSU, like many colleges, is battling budget woes forcing admins to cut programs they see as low-hanging fruit. Last year’s news of a budget deficit of $153 million over the next five years led President Laura Bloomberg to announce strategies to cut down costs—from axing the school’s wrestling team, to freezing admissions to 42 academic programs and nudging 54 employees into buyouts.

    But is WCSB’s rebranding one of them? Bomgardner said the station she helped run raised tens of thousands of dollars from donors per year, used mostly to pay those behind the scenes a per-semester stipend.

    Bloomberg herself denied the move was out of cost-cutting measure.

    “The decision to have Ideastream oversee WCSB programming is one step forward in our Cleveland State United vision, the strategic plan for our University launched earlier this year,” Bloomberg said in a press release. “CSU is uniquely embedded within the city of Cleveland, which provides students with opportunities to benefit from strategic partnerships like this one.”

    As of Friday, JazzNEO has taken over 89.3 FM, the station WCSB’s used since 1976. This isn’t the first link between Ideastream: WCPN, Ideastream’s main station, was once broadcasted out of CSU’s Joseph E. Cole Center. And CSU had a Tower Music series on WCLV in the 1970s.

    And CSU’s School of Film & Media Arts, located floors above Ideastream’s offices in Playhouse Square, has been a training ground for those hoping to find themselves after graduation behind the mic downstairs.

    More internships is not a good trade off, in Bomgardner’s mind, for axing WCSB’s original format.

    Shutting down the station on the fourth floor of Campus International, for her, whiffs of a move along the lines of shutting down CSU’s LGBTQ+ and Women’s center; cutting (then restarting) its U-Pass for RTA riders; and slashing anything DEI.

    “I think it shows CSU is not willing to stand for to members and their voices. All this is definitely influenced by politics,” Bomgardner said. “Ideastream is a safer play than having a hundred students with a hundred different opinions.”

    “I mean, if we wanted to be a jazz station,” she said, “we would’ve branded as one.”

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  • Russell Atkins, Cleveland Poet Who Made Strides in Avant-Garde Scene, Dead at 98

    Russell Atkins, Cleveland Poet Who Made Strides in Avant-Garde Scene, Dead at 98

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    Russell Atkins / Facebook

    The Cleveland poet Russell Atkins, who died at 98 on August 15, in an undated photo.

    Russell Atkins, the poet who reached national attention with his ear for the avant garde and who rarely left his hometown of Cleveland, died in an assisted living facility in Midtown on August 15. He was 98.

    Though a close friend and confidante to mainstays—and more well-known—of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, Atkins worked quietly over a six-decade career, producing a half dozen chapbooks of poetry and several scores of musical compositions.

    His collection Here in The, published by Cleveland State University’s Poetry Center in 1976, was surprisingly Atkins’ only full-length book released in his almost 10 decades of life. It spans the poet’s stylistic range that made him a sought-after mentor in Cleveland’s poetry scene from the 1990s to the early aughts.

    All of which fashioned Atkins as an anomaly just as he was a gem to those who had been lucky to discover his art.

    “He was one of the real geniuses of American poetry for about three decades,” poet and native Clevelander Kevin Prufer, who knew Atkins in his later years, told Scene. “And everything sort of conspires to keep him out of public view, even though he had a huge following in Cleveland. I mean, really loyal students.”

    One of the original progenitors of poetry’s Concrete movement, which argued that the visual form of a poem influences its meaning, Atkins actually spent his early years in music. In the 1940s, in his twenties, Atkins studied piano at the Cleveland School of the Arts and the Cleveland Institute of Music. He would compose boxes full of piano scores late until his eighties, yet he published or performed very little.

    In 1947, Atkins published his first work, “Poem,” in View, a budding journal of poetry and prose formed with the help of friend Hughes, who had moved to New York City to develop its own movement. It wasn’t until five years later, in 1952, when Atkins formed his own iteration, Free Lance, a magazine published locally, that he would help propel the work of fellow Black experimenters in verse.

    Like e.e. cummings and Audre Lorde, Atkins tinkered with the mixture of images and sounds through a non-conformist type of structure—words and phrases decorating the page with huge indents, in lowercase lettering or with a jazzy flair to their typography and musicality. Critics later gave such a name: phenomenalism.

    We see it throughout Atkins’ verse: a merging of form, color and sound. In “While Waiting for a Friend to Come to Visit a Friend in a Mental Hospital,” Atkins writes:

    the attendant keeps watch, watching
    that abrupt wild uranium grow a bat’s ears,
    sardine flowers, moons’ eggs,
          stomach guitars,
    a double-bass rump –– but he’s err:
    one shrewds to his inferences,
    here where the world’s sharp’d
    sheen’d across with antiseptic spear

    Just as we see, in Atkins’ dramatic take on Lake Erie, in “Lakefront, Cleveland”:

    it gathers strength
    summoned ascends huged up
                  then softs!
    curls up about rocks
    upcurls about thick
    about bold curls up
                  about it
    then dangerous ‘d soft!

    Prufer, who discovered Atkins’ work after attending a workshop at Cleveland State in the late 2000s, said he was so wowed at the poet’s sense of musicality that he included Atkins in Pleiades Press’ Unsung Masters Series, a 2010 book titled Russell Atkins: on the Life and Work of an American Master.

    A year later, back in Cleveland, Prufer decided to seek out Atkins, who was living in an assisted living facility in Midtown. The two met in Atkins’ apartment, discussed poetry. Atkins showed Prufer, he said, a closet-full collection of unpublished scores and letters from Marianne Moore and Hughes. (Those, Prufer recalled, later “burned” after a bedbug infestation.)

    Such discovery was a kind of metaphor for Atkins and his writings, which are hard to come by save for niche website archives and resales of early editions.

    “Russell was known and admired by many,” Prufer said, “but obscure to many of the people who would have gotten a great deal of benefit from knowing his work.”

    In 2017, Atkins was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Later that year, a portion of Grand Avenue in Midtown was renamed in his honor.

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Notre Dame College Will Close After Spring Semester

    Notre Dame College Will Close After Spring Semester

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    Notre Dame

    Notre Dame College in 2011.

    May 2 will be the final day students walk through the doors of Notre Dame College.

    On Thursday evening, the board of the South Euclid school announced that it will be ending its 102-year-long operations in Northeast Ohio this spring, and sending students elsewhere, despite years of attempts to save itself from financial ruin.

    As Scene reported in December, Notre Dame admins began talking this November in earnest about the viability of a healthy spring semester. Such talks came just weeks after former president Michael Pressimone “voluntarily” resigned, an official statement read, “to pursue new opportunities.” In July, the Sisters of Notre Dame, the coalition of nuns that founded the school, severed ties with the university.

    Notre Dame’s shuttering is resemblant of a national trend for smaller colleges and universities. A delayed ripple effect from the Great Recession, colleges with four-figure student counts are attempting to fight declining enrollment and steep operation costs with last-ditch fundraising grabs and—which is usually the case—cutting personnel, slashing budgets, even saying bye to under-attended majors.

    “Throughout this long process, we evaluated every possible option to continue the mission of Notre Dame College,” Terri Bradford Eason, chair of Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees, wrote in a press release this week. “Our primary focus has been to ensure our students can successfully continue their education, graduate, and—in the tradition of the Sisters of Notre Dame—live a life of personal, professional and global responsibility.”

    Those lives of global responsibility will most likely be happening locally for most of Notre Dame’s 1,400 students. As per the school’s new partnerships, finalized in February, students with over 60 accumulated credits under their belt will be able to transfer to one of nine nearby schools, which include: Baldwin Wallace, Cleveland State, Hiram, John Carroll, Kent State, Lake Erie, Ursuline, Walsh and Mercyhurst in Erie, Pennsylvania.

    Students with under 60 accumulated credits, those with “good standing,” “may have the opportunity” to transfer to one of the aforementioned schools, was all the release said.

    As in the case of Baldwin Wallace and Lakeland Community College, the internal management of funds predating the pandemic era has some linkage, said many interviewed by Scene, to colleges on the brink—or over the brink—of shutting their doors.

    Despite averaging a net income of $468,864 since 2011, the Notre Dame’s books may have been thrown by its Covid-era contributions in 2019, 2020 and 2021, when the school reported gains of $2.4 million, $1.4 million and $1.9 million. Last year, with 83 percent of its revenue hailing from “program services,” the school ended its year at a loss of $823,389, its worst of the past 11 years.

    “I’ve been watching the pattern. You can see revenue declining and expenses increasing,” one former employee told Scene back in December. “Personally, I think they probably should have been much more cautious about their expenditures over the last few years.”

    Working “tirelessly for years on multiple fronts,” the release stated, the board tried refinancing debt, combining these American Rescue Plan Act dollars and state grants, even leveraging its own centennial celebration as a 100-year fundraising campaign. (And pursuing mergers with two universities.)

    Yet, “these heroic efforts were not enough to close the financial gap in time to satisfy debt obligations and allow the school to continue to operate independently,” the release said.

    Students at Notre Dame will be able to get a head start on their Fall 2024 plans when the school hosts an exciting “Partner College/University Fair” event on Wednesday, March 13 from 12:30 to 5 p.m. at Notre Dame’s Keller Gymnasium.

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