Perched on a shelf in the WCFM 91.9 FM studio at Williams College sit well-loved copies of Moby Dick, Ulysses, and The Idiot. Band stickers are plastered on an entry door, records and CDs are spread throughout the room, and an overhead pipe rumbles — a reminder of the college radio station’s dorm basement digs. While many of the sights and sounds in this studio are common in student radio spaces; Herman Melville, James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoevsky tomes aren’t usually on my mental bingo card during college radio station tours.
Doing Radio at a “College of Nerds”
“It’s really a college of nerds,” mused WCFM General Manager Olivia Johnson as we chatted in the station in Williamstown, Massachusetts on a chilly morning in early October. She joked, “We love doing our homework. It’s our biggest passion. And then after that, it’s talking about doing our homework and then talking about our homework. It’s pretty much those three.” Johnson explained that the collection of novels are left over from recent on-air readathons. During these 24-hour broadcasts, station members take turns reading aloud from the chosen book of the year.
The most recent readathon was in December 2024, when WCFM brought The Idiot to the airwaves. Johnson described the experience, telling me, “That’s when the station really is at its creepiest, when you come in for your…4am slot and nobody’s here and you’re…reading Dostoevsky alone to yourself.” She said that Ulysses was her favorite and added that the guy who picked Moby Dick ended up writing his thesis, in part, about the book. “So it really made an impact,” she pointed out.
Connecting with Student Community through Radio
A senior history major, Johnson was first introduced to WCFM her freshman year when she regularly tagged along during a friend’s show. She eventually went through training herself and took on a variety of roles at the station. For her, listening to the campus radio station was a way to get to know other Williams students freshman year, during a time when she was looking to find community. “[It was] really amazing to turn on my radio and hear my friends voices and hear the shows of people who I didn’t know personally but who I’d seen around campus,” she recalled, adding, “It gave me this sort of personal window into the people who I saw every day.” Listening also caused her to feel connected to the “random” DJs behind the mic.
Since WCFM is a freeform station, it allows DJs and hosts to curate shows reflecting their own unique interests and tastes. For Johnson, that is an increasingly important aspect of college radio. “Especially today, especially in a time of…algorithms controlling so much of our content consumption, there’s something really valuable and important about creating…a playlist…for another person, which is actually a big sea of people who are faceless to you,” she explained.
Williams College Radio History: WMS Debuts in 1940
Student radio at Williams dates back to the 1930s, when amateur radio enthusiasts sent broadcasts from their dorm rooms. In 1940, AM carrier current station WMS was launched by students and in 1957 it expanded beyond campus through the addition of a low power class D FM channel at 90.1 FM with call letters WCFM. By the early 1970s, WCFM had increased its wattage to 444 watts and after a series of moves on the dial, shifted to its current frequency of 91.9 FM.
Old photos from WCFM’s past are on display on its newly-designed website, which embraces a vintage computer interface aesthetic, complete with animated gifs. A more elaborate WCFM history collage is on the wall of the broadcast studio, including print-outs of black and white photos of the station and DJs from decades past. Johnson noted that former WCFM General Manager Josh Picoult had collected the photos, which went up before a 2024 “throwback weekend” at the station. Picoult (class of 2024) wrote his senior thesis, “Gas Pipes, Gigahertz, and Grunge: Broadcasting at Williams College, 1940-1998,” about the station’s pre-streaming era. That same semester, he joined us on the Radio Survivor show to discuss that work (listen to podcast #340 for even more back story).
WCFM’s Variety of Freeform Programming
Housed in the basement of a freshman dorm (Prospect House), WCFM has hour-long live shows typically between 8am and 2am, with studio access unavailable (except for during the readathons) between 2am and 6am. At the time of my visit, there were around 130 DJs involved with WCFM and perhaps 20 hours of the weekly schedule were waiting to be filled by newly trained on-air hosts. In the interim, those slots were covered ad hoc by various DJs, included those extending their shows before and after the open hour.
Johnson described the range of programming on WCFM, including “chatty” talk shows amongst friends that tend to play 2000s pop and alternative 1990s music (including off of CDs), programs reflecting the taste of “a large folk contingent” of DJs, and a show run by the Williams College electronic music club in which they play their mixes. The station is also experimenting with four focused hours of specialty programming each week: Open Hour, Study Hall, Noisy Hour, and Anything But English. DJs are invited to pitch their ideas for one-hour shows along these themes each week. The categories were kept purposefully broad to spark open interpretation. Recent shows have dug into new releases and Russian rap and a future show was expected to feature Bulgarian folk.
Physical Music at WCFM
DJs at WCFM have an enviably large library of physical music to draw from. The main library is across the hall from the on-air booth, so WCFM keeps some of the most-played records and CDs close at hand in the studio. When I visited, some favorites (chosen by DJs, music directors and stacks librarians) were housed in wooden cubbies as well as on countertops. Releases from Pere Ubu, Ween, The Strokes, Vashti Bunyan, Live Skull, Elliott Smith, Boy Girl Party, and Flaming Lips were among the stacks and piles of currently-used records and CDs in the studio.
The majority of the music stacks are in a designated CD room and in a multi-room music office, where ongoing reorganization efforts are in progress. Johnson purposefully brings freshmen into the music office during their first few months of training. During meetings they pick out music to play and talk about. She explained that through this process, it “sort of sets a precedent,” so that new DJs will play vinyl. She described one freshman DJ who would lug stacks of records from the library into the studio for his show each week, noting that he’s now on the station’s board. Johnson speculated that maybe a third of the DJs use records at least some of the time, acknowledging that more people use CDs because “they are more familiar with the technology.”
As we toured through the record collection, Johnson pointed out the written reviews on many of the older records, telling me that WCFM staffers used to more consistently write comments and funny notes on album covers, which she enjoys finding in the library. The collection of music is wide-ranging, including 1960s pop, Paul Williams, Public Enemy, Frank Zappa, Dandy Warhols, Meices, and more. Stashed in U.S. mail bins and within rolling library-style shelves are many hidden gems.
WCFM Off-Air Activities, from Concerts to Publications
Off-the air, WCFM hosts concert series, including a semesterly Cov Ball (formerly known as Covercella) during which bands play cover tunes. The station has also produced a number of publications in recent years, including zines, newsletters, and even a mini comic describing WCFM’s illustrious history.
Many of these paper artifacts are on display on the walls of WCFM, including a poster-sized summer newsletter. As we chatted in the hallway before she had to head off to class, Johnson talked about the meaning behind these creations. “We really like having something tangible,” she said. Acknowledging the ephemeral nature of radio, she mused, “We don’t record all of our shows, so a lot of what you do is just gone after you do it…This is kind of the counterpoint to that…having all this physical stuff.”
Thanks to WCFM + Station Tour Archive
Thanks to Olivia Johnson for showing me around WCFM and for the engaging conversation about college radio generally. This is my 187th radio station tour report and my 129th college radio station tour. You can view the entire collection of my radio station visits in numerical order or by station type in our archives.
