There has been conflict from the early 1920s until the present between those who believe there is a need for nonprofit educational broadcasting and those who do not. For example, many commercial broadcasters believe that the frequencies occupied by noncommercial educational radio might be better employed for advertising. On the other hand, although its potential has never been fully realized, educational radio-like the internet-has such high potential that its use for education attracted many enthusiastic supporters.

     This conflict is pervasive. In the late 1920s, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) encouraged shared-time broadcasters to persuade educational institutions to give up their licenses. In the early 1930s, the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment was proposed to reserve channels for nonprofits. In 1941 channels were first set aside or reserved for education on the new FM band. In 1946, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued its "Blue Book" (Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees), it called upon commercial stations to cater to the needs of nonprofit organizations. However, the storm of protest from commercial stations about the "Blue Book" buried this idea at the time.

     But although the record shows that educational radio has often been impressively effective in schools and adult education, it frequently was underappreciated. Educational broadcasting was cavalierly dismissed for decades, even though it was originally touted as a great advance. For decades, arguments in favor of a separate educational radio service relied on an analogy with the public service philosophy of agricultural extension intrinsic to the land grant colleges.

Origins: 1920-33

     Indeed, one land grant institution, the University of Wisconsin, owns WHA, one of the oldest radio broadcasting stations in the United States. Land grant colleges were interested in outreach-the extension of their expertise to isolated regions. As a result, they first used radio both to provide lectures on topics of more or less general interest and to give specific information on topics intended to serve citizens of their state, such as agriculture and home economics. A few tried to use radio for fund raising in the early 1920s, with very limited success.

     A number of stations were merely the tangible results of experiments by engineering and physics faculty and students (such as Alfred Goldsmith, who operated 2XN at City College of New York, 1912-14) who wished to explore the phenomenon of wireless telephony. However, once they had tinkered to their heart's content, the daunting need to find content for their transmissions led, in many instances, to these stations' being turned over to departments of speech, English, music, and extension services. Another reason for this transfer was that the cost of programming, once the technical facilities met the FRC's standards, was a major expense.

     Even before World War I, radio telegraph and some radio telephone experimentation had taken place at such colleges and universities as Arkansas, Cornell, Dartmouth, Iowa, Loy­ola, Nebraska, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Tulane, and Villanova, in addition to Wisconsin. After stations were allowed back on the air in 1919 following the war, regular broadcasting service was started by many of these and others either for extension courses or strictly for publicity.

     By 1 May 1922, when the number of radio stations was beginning a meteoric rise, the Department of Commerce's Radio Service Bulletin reported that more than IO percent (23 of 21 8) of the broadcasting stations then on the air were licensed to colleges, universities, a few trade schools, high schools, religious organizations, and municipalities. This proportion soon climbed, with 72 stations (13 percent) licensed to educational institutions among the 556 on the air in 1923, and 128 (22 percent) of a similar total (571) in 1925.

     Although early records are imprecise-noncommercial AM stations were issued the same type of license as commercial ones-many of these stations were short-lived. Not only did it appear that there was no pressing need for educational radio, but other factors pared the number on the air from 98 in 1927 (perhaps 13 percent of all stations) to half that (43, or 7 per­ cent) in 1933. Although nearly 200 standard broadcast (AM) stations were licensed to educational institutions through 1929, almost three-quarters were gone as early as 1930. The 47 stations that remained, however, were tenacious-and roughly half of them continued to serve their audiences at the beginning of the 21st century.

     The number of both commercial and noncommercial stations dropped in the late 1920s, largely because of the expensive technical requirements imposed by the FRC under the Radio Act of 1927. Additionally, the FRC's 1927-29 reallocations and elimination of marginal and portable stations often gave desirable channels to commercial operators at the expense of educational institutions. The costs of new interference-reducing transmitters and other facilities were imposed just prior to the economic dislocations of the Great Depression-which dried up funds for colleges and commercial companies alike.

     In addition, many university administrators saw no value in radio. At best, running a radio station, except where it also served curricular needs or could be used effectively by agricultural extension services, seemed to be a lot of work and expense for limited reward during tough times. Many institutions appeared glad that the FRC's new rules gave them an excuse to drop this expensive toy. This lack of interest closed many educational stations.

     Into the 1930s, some educational stations found themselves pressured by local shared-time broadcasters to give up their frequencies for full-time use by commercial stations. To sweeten the deal, commercial broadcasters often offered to air some educational programming. Because commercial stations had more lobbying clout and deeper pockets and, in many cases, appeared to be more stable, closing down educational stations sounded very attractive to policy makers. It also sounded good to timid college administrators who didn't recognize the benefits of using radio for teaching, tended to allocate funding in other directions, and found commercial offers a "win-win" choice-until the promised educational program­ ming was crowded out by advertising-supported programs.

     A hard core of educational broadcasters successfully claimed that their stations were serving both the public interest and the interests of their parent institutions. But where there were not enough trained and interested personnel to argue for retention and financial support, many college and university stations no longer had an educational mission-nor, usually, a license.

     Concern for their dwindling numbers and interest in ways of using radio effectively led radio educators to band together. In mid-1929, the Advisory Committee on Education by Radio was formed with backing from the Payne Fund, the Carnegie Endowment, and J.C. Penney, but it died before 1930 without having had much effect. In 1930 two rival organizations that would represent educational radio for a decade were organized: the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education and the National Committee on Education by Radio. The council worked with grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment and called on commercial stations to meet education's needs. The committee, with support from the Payne Fund, asked that nonprofit educational entities be given 15 percent of all station assignments-which would double the number of educational stations; the committee also attacked "commercial monopolies" and disagreed with what it called the "halfway" measures of the council.

     One result of the proselytizing by both organizations was a Senate-mandated 1932 FRC survey of educational programs on both commercial and noncommercial stations. Having carefully timed the.ir survey for National Education Week, when most stations scheduled some educational programs, the FRC concluded that commercial stations were adequately filling educational needs. Congress was not completely convinced, and Senators Wagner and Hatfield sponsored an unsuccessful amendment to the 1934 Communications Act allocating 25 percent of broadcast facilities to nonprofit organizations. After this failed, another dozen of the remaining educational stations began to take advertising in 1933 to meet operating costs and to cover American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) music licensing fees.

     The campaign for a set-aside of channels for education continued, resulting in Section 307 (c) of the Communications Act of 1934, which told the new Federal Communications Commission to "study the proposal that Congress by statute allocate fixed percentages of radio broadcasting facilities to particular types or kinds of non-profit radio programs or to persons identified with particular types or kinds of non-profit activities." The FCC held extensive hearings-100 witnesses, 13,000 pages of transcript-in the fall of 1934 and (as might have been anticipated) recommended against reservation of frequencies, for educator cooperation with commercial stations and networks, and for the establishment of another committee.

     The resulting Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC) was originally composed of 15 broadcasters; 15 educators or members of groups such as the Parent-Teacher Association; and 10 government officials, newspaper publishers, and others, and it was headed by U.S. Commissioner of Education John Studebaker. "Broadcasters" ranged from network heads to the National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) music and education directors. The committee's purposes were to "eliminate controversy and misunderstanding between groups of educators and between the industry and educators" and to "promote actual cooperative arrangements between educators and broadcasters on national, regional, and local bases." A "subcommittee on conflicts and cooperation" was to try to deal with any friction between "the commercial and the social or educational broadcasters."

Holding On: The I930s

     FREC operated a script exchange (used by 108 stations and a large number of local groups in its first full year) and planned 18 major research projects so it could make valid recommendations. Funding-roughly two-thirds from educational foundations and one-third from the broadcasting industry (through the National Association of Broadcasters)-did not live up to expectations, and roughly half of the projects had to be dropped. Although some useful publications, a supply of standardized classroom receivers, and a great deal of script distribution resulted, the FREC actually held only one full meeting. It disbanded after World War II. Nevertheless, for more than three decades, most educational broadcasters looked to the U.S. Office of Education, headed by Franklin Dunham and Gertrude Broderick, for coordination, sympathy, and low-cost practical assistance.

     Because there were then no educational networks of any sort, the exchange of scripts was the best way to give educational stations and their audiences access to programming prepared by others. Beginning in early 1929, the Payne Fund supported daily Ohio School of the Air broadcasts on powerful commercial station WLW in Cincinnati. These programs, intended for in-school listening, were produced in the studios of WOSU, then and now licensed to the Ohio State University in Columbus. The Ohio state legislature appropriated money to partly cover production costs, teacher guides, and pupil materials. Later, WOSU, in the center of the state, became the primary transmitter of this program. Another early educational series for below-college-level classroom listening was the Wisconsin School of the Air, which began on university-owned WHA in the fall of 193 r. WHA started a "College of the Air" two years later.

     During radio's "golden age" from 1934 until the end of World War II, educational radio survived-but barely. The 43 educational AM stations on the air in 1933 dropped to no more than 35 by mid-194 r. Roughly half had been on the air more than 15 years, 12 were commercially supported, and 7 of these were affiliated with a commercial network, airing educational programs only a few hours a day. One was operated by a high school, 2 were operated by church-affiliated educational groups, 9 by agricultural schools or state agricultural departments, and 11 by land grant universities, mostly in the Midwest. Only 11 stations were licensed for unlimited broadcast time, about half of them in the 250- to 5,000-watt category.

     Commercial stations and national networks regularly scheduled some avowedly educational programming. In the 1920s, commercial broadcasters started "radio schools of the air," lectures, and even courses for credit. WJZ (New York) began such broadcasts in 1923, WEAF (New York) followed, and WLS (Chicago) started its Little Red Schoolhouse series in 1924. Such programs, often in association with school boards, were long-lived and useful to the stations' images. For example, WFIL (Philadelphia) aired the WFIL Studio Schoolhouse, a series of daily radio programs, complete with teachers' manuals, in the mid-1950s. The Standard School Broadcasts (Standard Oil Company) were broadcast over a number of California stations into the 1960s.

     A 1928 FRC study of 100 stations in the western United States had found that radio was supplying more features and more plays but fewer children's programs and less educational material than three years earlier. The study also found that, of the 54 hours that the average station was on the air each week, 5 were devoted to education and lectures other than on farm subjects, and 3 hours were on farm reports and talks. FCC hearings in 1934 contained testimony that networks and larger stations were more cooperative with educators than were small and independent stations. Although the amount of such program­ming did not rise appreciably over the next two decades, neither did it fall until most commercial radio adopted all-music formats in reaction to the success of television in the 1950s.

     Educational programming tended to be of three kinds: classroom instruction in English, history, social studies, and other disciplines, intended for classes from kindergarten to college; extension study, typically in fields that would be useful to the state or region being served, such as detailed agricultural practices and marketing news; and general cultural programs, such as classical music, which were inexpensive to produce.

     Few stations of any sort produced dramatic programs, because the need for proven stories, talented performers, and special skills (such as sound effects) tended to require a major investment in time as well as money. College football and baseball games were often carried on college stations-at least until they became popular enough that more-powerful commercial stations offered to carry them. One potential audience given special attention by nonprofit stations was children, with programs of all types from stories and games to health instruction.

     By the failure to provide an adequate number of channels on the AM band for education was not forgotten. National organizations continued to agitate for an adequate number of channels or to coordinate the efforts of existing stations. These groups included the FREC, the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education, the Institute for Education by Radio, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), and the National Committee on Education by Radio.

     The Institute for Education by Radio was established at the Ohio State University in 1930 by I. Keith Tyler, and it hosted annual practitioner conferences on educational radio until 1960. Its published proceedings are a good source of contemporary thinking about what radio was doing for education­ and might still do with sufficient support.

     The NAEB was founded in 1934, but it traced its lineage to the Association of College and University Broadcasting Stations, established during the rush to get education on the air in 1925. NAEB was primarily a program idea exchange during the period up until World War II, but some of its 25 members also experimented with off-the-air rebroadcasting.

     The National Committee on Education by Radio, mentioned earlier, worked hard for allocation of educational channels and sponsored annual conferences from 1931 to 1938, when its Rockefeller Foundation funding ended. One of the committee's more interesting initiatives was to help establish local listening councils-groups of critical listeners who would work with local broadcasters to improve existing programs and plan new ones.

     In an attempt to secure educational channels without stepping on the toes of commercial broadcasters, the National Committee on Education by Radio proposed that new educational stations be assigned to channels in the 1500-1600 kilohertz range, just above the standard (AM) broadcasting band of the time. These stations, however, typically would have had less range than those on lower frequencies and would have had to purchase new transmitters and antennas in many instances. Furthermore, there was no way of ensuring that receivers would be built that could pick up this band. As a result, most educators had little enthusiasm. (These frequencies eventually had limited use for high-fidelity AM experimental broadcasting, using 20-kilohertz-wide channels. In March 1941 they were added to the regular AM band.)

     Early in 1938, the FCC reversed its earlier position and established the first specific spectrum reservations for noncom­mercial broadcast use, in the 41- to 42-megahertz band. After the FCC set aside 25 channels for in-school broadcasting, the Cleveland Board of Education was licensed (as WBOE) in November 1938. The next year, this allocation was moved to the 42- to 43-megahertz band, and the broadcasters using it were required to change from AM to the new frequency modulation (FM) mode of modulation. The first noncommercial educational FM stations were authorized in 1941. Because FM required a much wider bandwidth, this allocation provided only five channels, on which two fully licensed (and possibly five experimental) stations were transmitting to radio­ equipped classrooms by late 1941. When commercial FM went into operation, education was assigned channels at the bottom of the overall band, which were fractionally easier for listeners to receive than higher ones. The interference-free reception and high audio fidelity of FM initially were very attractive, and half a million sets were sold before all civilian radio manufacturing was ended by the demands of World War II.

Postwar Rebirth: To 1967

     This opportunity to establish new educational stations was welcomed. Although the wartime construction "freeze" of 1942 exempted educational broadcasting stations, scarcity of construction materials and broadcast equipment-together with the slow decision-making processes of educational institutions-meant that educational FM broadcasting at the end of the war in 1945 consisted of about 25 AM stations, plus 12 FM authorizations and 6 FM stations on the air. Nevertheless, many potential educational broadcasters used the war years for planning, realizing that finally, after more than a decade of talking about educational radio, they had the means to accom­plish it.

     But there were complications. In 1945 the FCC shifted the educational FM allotment to 88-92 megahertz, at the bottom of a new FM band. Because only a handful actually had to replace transmitters, this change was reluctantly accepted. The number of noncommercial educational FM stations grew substantially after World War II. Although these data are not completely reliable, it appears that there were 10 such stations on the air at the start of 194 7 and 8 5 by 19 52, 14 percent of all FM stations then on the air. The number kept rising and the proportion remained respectable: 98 in 1953, 141 in 1958, 209 in 1963, and 326 (16 percent) on 1 January 1968.

     Perhaps chastened by earlier experiences with educational AM radio, institutions of higher education, school districts, and nonprofit community groups were initially hesitant to apply for FM licenses. Apart from past disappointments, high costs, and the need for colleges and universities to earmark resources to serve the millions of postwar students, potential operators were wary of the continuing paucity of homes with FM receivers and the possible effects of another new medium, television.

     Late in 1948 the FCC, recognizing the burdens of high cost and the limited or campus-only uses planned by some colleges, approved a new class of 10-watt stations. These low-power FM stations were immediately popular and constituted more than one-third of the 92 educational FM stations on the air in 1952. Audio tape recording's potential was first realized by Sey­mour Siegel of WNYC in 1946. Recording also made it possible to reuse programs; for example, one station was still rebroadcasting some 1945 children's programs in the 199os­ and they still were attracting youthful audiences. In 1951 the Kellogg Foundation provided funds to NAEB to establish a tape duplication operation at the University of Illinois, Urbana, to facilitate a non-interconnected "bicycle network" by which tape recordings of one station's programs were mailed to other stations in succession. Soon, more than 40 stations were participating. The NAEB Tape Network was made possible by the postwar introduction of high-fidelity magnetic tape recorders, which replaced clumsy and fragile 15- or 16-inch transcription discs.

     However, some postwar regional or statewide FM networks were established, as in Alabama and Wisconsin. In the latter, eight stations provided a full day's programming to schools, colleges, and adults in most of the state. The National Educational and Radio Center, established in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1954 and later moved to New York, eventually started providing some taped radio programs through a subsidiary. At least one independent group of noncommercial stations, affiliated with the Pacifica Foundation, still operates stations across the country; another, the KRAB Nebula, organized by Lorenzo Milam, was more ephemeral.

     Many educationally licensed stations programmed a great deal of classical or folk music and jazz, which were timeless and inexpensive. While education, music, and talk programs were generally inexpensive, news coverage was not, and educational radio therefore played a fairly minor role in the listening habits of most members of radio's audience into the 1960s.

     During the period up to 1967, educational radio remained an orphan in many ways. Although given general support in regulatory matters by the FCC and Congress, funding was a perennial local problem. Studies of educational radio usually arrived at the obvious conclusions that money and a national rather than strictly local image were needed. On a local level, some educational radio stations served the public interest economically and well. Some acted both as training laboratories­ for example, municipally owned WNYC trained interns from colleges across the country, and its sister station, WNYE, used high school students to create programs for schools throughout New York City-and as sources of a wider variety of programming for the many people who were not well served by the commercial radio broadcasting industry. Although not the first to lobby, the 1966 Wingspread Conference on Educational Radio as a National Resource came at the right time to argue for federal funding for radio, a proposal that succeeded in including radio in the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. This provision of some facilities and program funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR after 1967 gave educational radio a very different look.